The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  Blue Moon Dancer wasn’t as sure. But the prisoners were shackled and compliant. Smiling Fire Hawk was a rigid man. He only agreed to march them south by the ocean route because he enjoyed the ocean. Hot salt cracked their faces. The young scout was thirsty. They would reach the lake’s northern shore in two days and then row for another day before they reached home.

  Blue Moon Dancer’s vision went white and then black as he fell. A terrific pressure melted into pain that made him gasp. The hard-packed sand knocked the air from his lungs as it arrested his fall. He rolled, grasped blindly at his spear, spun into a crouch, and planted the spear’s butt as he had been taught. It struck nothing. Nothing struck him. His head ached as his vision returned. He had tripped over a boulder on the beach.

  But it was more than a boulder. He dropped his feather-laden spear in the sand. It looked like… he glanced up. The prisoners were less than fifty strides away. Had they seen him trip and fall? Or had they seen him spy the obstacle, avoid it, and prepare for battle?

  It didn’t matter. This was more than a rock. It was a statue. Someone had carved a man, or perhaps their drunken idea of a man, and left it on the beach. He touched the statue’s mottled skin. It was smoother than it looked but still rough. The remnants of lichen stained the lithic surface. He traced the arms around to the hands. They were too thick, too sharp, too harsh to be human.

  Was this a demon? He had seen demon carvings before. Wasn’t the great basin that received the hearts of their sacrifices carved in the form of a jaguar demon? This looked much like that. But it was human, too. He knew he shouldn’t have touched it, but the gods placed it in the path. They loved to torment daydreamers. He would be connected to it now and forever.

  He stepped back. It was meant to be a man. How long had it been here? He walked this very beach less than a year before. Why would someone leave a statue? And of such rare stone? It looked like simple stone in some places but like sparkling obsidian in others. The open eyes were the largest pearls he had ever seen. The figure kneeled, its arms at its sides, as it watched the waiting ocean. Salt crusted its vaguely human face. They had that in common, at least.

  The slaves arrived. He heard someone whisper his name. They had seen him fall, hadn’t they? It did not matter. They would be sacrificed to Tlaloc, who would bring more rain.

  “What have you found?”

  Smiling Fire Hawk’s thoughts mattered more. He was slapping the saw-toothed macuahuitl’s polished flat edge against his thigh. Each slap made a prisoner startle. He waited until the prisoners could only see his back and then flashed Blue Moon Dancer a wink. It was important to maintain terror.

  The eagle warrior knew his jaguar captain would not ask again. He wore his jaguar fur draped over his broad shoulders even now in the late spring when the days were long and the sun was hot. Its yellowed teeth hung in front of the captain’s face such that they could snarl at the whole world together.

  “A statue of some kind. I do not know why it is here. I traveled this beach less than a year ago and did not see such a thing.”

  He struggled to keep his parched voice from cracking during the report.

  “I traveled this beach just a few months ago and did not see such a thing,” the captain said. “Someone left it here. Strange times.”

  Smiling Fire Hawk rubbed his stubbled chin as he considered his lieutenant.

  “What is your judgement?”

  “I… I do not understand.”

  “You found this thing, have you not? And while returning from your first Flower War, albeit unblooded. The gods smile on those from Tenochtitlan! It is a simple question. What should we do with it, Blue Moon Dancer?”

  “We should… we should… carry it home with us.”

  Blue Moon Dancer’s knee throbbed. It would be a long walk.

  “I meant, the prisoners should carry it home for us. We will present it to the priests and they will study it.”

  Smiling Fire Hawk swung his macuahuitl around to the prisoners. They bowed their heads but several managed sidelong glares at the young scout. Though prisoners, and despite the Alliance’s overwhelming superiority against any one city-state, there were still rules. Captives from the Flower War were not slave labor. They honored their cities by fighting in the war and should be honored as sacrifices for helping to ensure new rain.

  Smiling Fire Hawk’s imperious voice ended the brewing argument.

  “There is no debate. The gods through their machinations left this statue in our path for Blue Moon Dancer to discover. You will carry it to Tenochtitlan. Who knows?” He threw both hands to the sky. “This statue may be the everlasting answer to the questions of blood and rain. It may be your children’s salvation.”

  They reached the lake in three days, not two. The statue was a cursed thing. Its surprising weight and awkward shape allowed just six men, at most, to carry it. The slaves rotated in crews while on land. In the boat, there was nothing to be done. Each idle wave threatened to ruin the statue’s precarious balance. It would overturn the boat and cast itself into the lake.

  What if it was truly cursed? Blue Moon Dancer would be the one who cursed the whole lake. What if they lost the slaves? Blue Moon Dancer would be the one who ruined a successful Flower War. Then he would have to widow his wife. He could not sleep at all. They rowed through the night.

  Then there was the city. It sprawled across the dammed lake, a mesh of islands, canals, bridges, and boats more spectacular than anything else in the world. Its sister cities were magnificent in their own way but Blue Moon Dancer knew he could only ever love his home. What other people, what other tribes, dared build a floating city here in the very middle of the lake? Gardens grew on the surface of the water. It was a marvel.

  Nezhuacoyotl the Lord Coyote was even beginning his long-planned project to split the worthless brackish lake water from the clear water with a dam. A whole lake! Even Tlacopan and Texcoco with their wealth and power were not as bold as this. He smiled every time he saw the city. With the morning sun casting its scant rays across his back to illuminate his home, it was perfect.

  The boat bumped the dock. The prisoners paused. He saw Smiling Fire Hawk’s grip tighten on his macuahuitl. The prisoners froze. Blue Moon Dancer remembered his duties and scampered off the boat. He secured each rope. His captain barked orders as the prisoners struggled to lift the roped statue out of the boat.

  They slipped and the statue fell onto a prisoner’s foot. He screamed. Blue Moon Dancer reached for the rope as the boat’s bow rocked close to the water’s surface. Someone slammed into his arm and ran past. Had they sprang from the boat before the statue fell and caused the pointless injury? There was no reason for any prisoner to suffer. They were heroes. The fleeing prisoner faded into the grey dawn.

  “Go, boy!” Smiling Fire Hawk was grinning as he shouted the command, grinning as though he had finally released his newest hunting hound for its first test.

  Blue Moon Dancer crouched and slipped his knife from his ankle sheath. He had practiced so many times. Sometimes slaves ran. They had to learn. His heart fluttered. The morning grey brightened into brilliant clarity. There was the prisoner, just at the end of the dock. The eagle warrior exploded. Had he not been selected for this very moment, to fly like the kings of the sky and slay his city’s enemies?

  His sure feet danced atop the milled paving stones. They could not trip. The wearied slave heard footfalls, glanced back, and ran faster. It did not matter. The scout caught the prisoner mid-stride.

  Blue Moon Dancer arrested all his momentum on one heel, spun and hooked his other foot around the desperate man’s legs as the man swung his own fist, forced the same fist and arm into the air, and drove his knife under the man’s ribcage directly into his heart.

  The prisoner collapsed. In instant death, he was only a man again. Black blood ran out onto the stones. The warm life covered Blue Moon Dancer’s hand. The knife was slick. The blood would stain him. He started to wipe it off but his hands would not ob
ey. The knife clattered on the stones, splashing more blood onto his bronze shins.

  How old was the man? His face was smooth. He was muscular like a warrior but free of any scars. Even Blue Moon Dancer had scars. They came with training, so that a man’s first wound would not be on the battlefield. This was only a boy. He had pierced his ear with a long gold wire that wrapped again and again around the helix. He was royalty of some kind. Had he even volunteered or was he the forsaken third or fourth son of an unlucky prince? This boy’s mother already mourned for him. She would curse the gods when she learned her son hadn’t even been sacrificed. His death was a waste.

  Blue Moon Dancer tried to pick up his knife. His hands slipped on the grip. He paused, drew a deep breath, and held it while he recovered the weapon. It was cold, heavy, no longer his. His captain approached.

  “Well done, boy. You are quick! Every movement was well-executed.”

  Smiling Fire Hawk dipped two fingers in the slain man’s blood and dragged them across his shaking lieutenant’s forehead.

  “You are a blooded warrior now. Go home. I will deliver the prisoners and your statue.”

  Blue Moon Dancer stared at his captain. It wasn’t anger or rage. He knew those. Nor was it the enduring sadness he associated with all life. He felt empty. There wasn’t even shock to numb him. The sun had risen over the eastern mountains. The lake would sparkle soon. The sun’s light would warm the cold stones. The day would begin for everyone except the boy he killed for the crime of wanting his life. No, for the crime of defying Tenochtitlan.

  Smiling Fire Hawk grasped Blue Moon Dancer by both shoulders and squeezed until it hurt.

  “You have done a thing today. I will no longer call you boy. You are a man and my trusted lieutenant. Now go home. Wake your wife and do manly things with her. Take the day. I will find you when I need you.”

  Blue Moon Dancer slipped his bloody knife into the sheath around his ankle and headed for home. He could bathe there, at least. The blood had to come off his hands eventually.

  ◆◆◆

  Priest and king watched together from the stone pier as Takka dragged another massive builder stone into the water. The lake lapped at the pier, soaking Blue Moon Dancer’s feet. He enjoyed its cool touch. Even after a so many years, he flinched when his friend vanished into the lake. One day Takka would forget to come up and would be gone. He might walk across the lake’s silty bottom and find himself at Tlacopan. The bastards would not know what to do with him. He took so long to learn.

  Lord Coyote clapped his priest on the shoulders. The priest resisted a flinch. A tlatoani touching anyone usually meant punishment. This particular high lord was known both for his tidal moods and curious ways of thinking. Who else would have imagined damming the whole lake? But he was undeniably partial to Blue Moon Dancer. After all, he discovered Takka.

  The lord’s knotted hands were calloused. He worked on the canal as hard as any worker except Takka. More than one tlatoani protested him dirtying his hands with a servant’s job. It made the high lords seem like commoners. None could deny the results, though, as Lord Coyote of the Texcoco brought his canal-building gifts to Tenochtitlan. His work separated dirty water from clean to nourish the city. His shoulders were tan as leather and his braided hair was baked in the sun, though he still wore gold trinkets in the braids that whispered to each other as the little lord surveyed the construction. Blue Moon Dancer had learned to like him.

  “Lord, how many more stones must he lay today? The sun sets. His mind will shift to our conversations.”

  “Oh, this is the last,” the lord said in his curiously melodic voice. “He laid fifteen today including this one. The foundation is a city block longer. Our masons struggle to make builder stones at pace. What new things have you learned from him?”

  The words slipped like a knife through the young evening’s pleasant breeze. Blue Moon Dancer set his teeth. The man was always probing. Was he looking for more evidence that Takka was truly a messenger of his fabled Unknown God of All? The idea was beyond blasphemous. Only the builder lord could get away with it. He had told the priest before that he considered Takka’s enduring ignorance to be proof that humans were meant to learn the language of the Unknowable God. Only then would his messenger speak up to share his hidden wisdom.

  There was already Huitzilopochtli who blessed the Mexica, Tlaloc who made the rain, and so many gods that even the priests lost count. But Lord Coyote still honored these known gods as he searched for an unknown one and Blue Moon Dancer did like him very much, or at least the his influence.

  “I regret to admit, little. He circles back to the same story.”

  “The woman with the water.” Lord Coyote frowned as he mentioned her.

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Tell me again. It has been many months since we last discussed it. I am sure he enriches the story with the language you teach him.”

  “Oh, it is much the same, my lord. The beginning is mostly obscured, as though he does not have the words even in his own mind to express it. He was lost and wild. He wandered for many years south from a frozen land.”

  It was more than that, but Blue Moon Dancer was protective of his friend’s secrets. He understood less than half of the strange creature’s relict language. A word like vatn meant water, more, or perhaps more water. It might mean river or even ocean.

  Takka grinned and shook his hand when he said Hallo. It must be a greeting or a blessing. He spoke enough Nahuatl to form fragmentary sentences, if he focused.

  But when talking about his time alone in the empty northern places of the world, Takka’s pidgin language flowed in a broken jumble that somehow told a story the priest understood. He could even be hypnotic, for an idiot.

  He had traveled alone for a long time. The man had no concept of numbers, or of the faint but crucial movements of the stars, both of which baffled the priest. All civilized people knew the stars. How else could you interpret the movements of the cosmos or the thoughts of the gods? He might have traveled there for a few years or a few lifetimes. Blue Moon Dancer suspected it was lifetimes.

  He walked south out of places made entirely of ice and down along a crumbling mountain range that ended in the placid waters of an ocean that sounded much like their own nearby Teotatl That Circled the World, on whose shores Blue Moon Dancer had found the living statue years before. All lands ended at the same ocean, didn’t they?

  Takka slept in heathered fields where stars swirled above while he dreamed of seeds and trees. He watched enormous shaggy creatures he called hreindyr run across the grassy plains in herds as sprawling as the sky. Blue Moon Dancer knew of these buffalo herds far to the north of the Mexica’s ancestral home. If Takka’s words were true then he had traveled from above the top of the world to be here. Did the gods live in palaces of endless ice?

  “Blue Moon Dancer, the sun is fades with my patience. What hides inside your skull?”

  “Apologies, my lord. I was remembering many conversations. His grasp of our language improves. He speaks not often of the travelling time. We have discussed this before.”

  “Of course. Your idea that he is heaven-sent from a distant land where the ice never ends. But that story has many concerns, does it not? I sent scouts to find this endless ice. Those who return report traveling more than a year and not finding a place like this. The people they meet know nothing of it.”

  The priest made himself hold still. Lord Coyote conveniently neglected to mention that his scouts did not report an end to the world. They simply turned back after a year. The high lord could interpret his nervousness as deceit. Lord Coyote offered no blood sacrifices to his Unknowable God but he allowed the sacrifice of many living things to the Known Gods.

  Blue Moon Dancer looked down and saw his own fingers tracing the soft place where his ribs met in his chest.

  “I knew nothing of these expeditions but with your permission would like to meet these scouts. Perhaps their vast knowledge of the frontiers could help my di
scussions.”

  The lord nodded. Why would he allow it now when he denied it before? He must have learned what he could from his own scouts already and now hoped the priest could learn more, perhaps reveal more. Both men knew the former scout was less than forthcoming. The Lord Coyote indulged it. Blue Moon Dancer continued.

  “Mostly he speaks of Quanah, the water woman who named him. He has also started dream…”

  “Oh! What is there to speak of her? She is some northern farm girl if even she exists. We make no progress with this approach.”

  “If I may, lord…” Blue Moon Dancer held out his empty upturned palm in supplication. “She is important to him. The temple speculates that she was his portal from the lands of the gods into our world. She gifted him with our speech. It is my belief that she reminded him of someone crucial from his life among the gods. The portal between worlds is…”

  The high lord arched his eyebrow. He would never speak the blasphemous words, not openly, but many among the priesthood knew his doubts about their religion. Blue Moon Dancer himself had doubts, but those were only about how to interpret the gods. Surely they existed.

  “Birth and death as the portal between worlds for all except the gods. Yes, I am aware of these things. So he is either a god himself, was born, or has died before and returned... Perhaps he is a kind of living dead thing?”

  “Any transition among worlds would be most jarring, lord. It is not difficult to imagine how a messenger might forget himself in the crossing. This woman may have reminded him of who he was.”

  “This is leading to another request, I sense.”

  “If I may,” the priest turned his other palm upwards, “we could learn much more if we found her. If she is a reminder, a kind of signal to the knowledge he lost during his crossing, perhaps she and I together could uncover more than I, alone.”