The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  “Another expedition.”

  Nezhuacoyotl stepped to the pier’s edge.

  “Texcoco will spare neither resources nor scouts now. There are… you are aware of the growing tension among the sister cities. Between your home and mine, even. The conquered cities grow restless. There are guerillas in the jungles who attack our trade caravans within the very bounds of our domain. I cannot spare scouts to find a woman who may not exist. You must find another way to learn his language.”

  A figure burst to the lake’s surface near them. It began swimming to the pier. That figure climbed onto the platform and began to clean himself off. A layer of rich silt covered most of his body. He turned the side of his clawed hand and scraped every surface he could reach with a studied precision.

  Takka looked up when he finished cleaning himself to begin his report to Lord Coyote but saw Blue Moon Dancer standing there. The poor creature’s milky eyes betrayed his unabashed excitement. It was time to learn now. The day’s work was done.

  Even covered in the lake’s filthy mud, he was a spectacle. Taller than both men by two heads but leaner than any person the priest had seen, he looked more grown from stone than carved from it. Other priests called the creature a living statue and Blue Moon Dancer understood. Had he not awoken from that very form when Blue Moon Dancer discovered him on the beach?

  But to call him this was to deny his life. Statues were cold things, never alive. Flecks of moss and obsidian dotted his mottled grayish-blue hide. An endless spider web of fissures lined his body. He looked to the priest like the bottom of the ocean must look. His eyes, though, the priest could never accept. They were the color of the moon behind mist and lacked distinguishing structure. His lips slit a hard line across the mask of his weathered face. A mockery of corded hair grew, or perhaps had been carved, in a neat bundle behind his head. But the hair neither moved nor grew and so it looked more like a crown.

  Stranger even than the eyes was the lack of any organ to signal the creature’s gender. It was as though the gods during their creation drafted this thing and threw it away before birthing humanity. Or perhaps, Blue Moon Dancer wondered deep inside his private thoughts, the gods discarded their human draft in favor of Takka’s kind.

  Blue Moon Dancer knew Takka could continue working through the night. The builder lord took advantage of his strength and stamina many times but had finally conceded the night to the priest so that Takka could continue to learn. No one could teach him to speak while at the bottom of the lake. If he could not speak, the Mexica would never learn to speak his language and Lord Coyote would never meet his Unknowable God.

  “Takka, tell me,” the high lord commanded.

  “Stone set.” He graveled as he stared at his friend the priest.

  “Is the line straight? Show me.”

  The living statue held out an upturned palm and dragged his sharp fingertip across the surface, scoring a perfect chalky line that ran from wrist to fingers.

  “Straight. Line.”

  “You are covered in silt. What gave you trouble? Tell me.”

  Takka looked again to his friend. This time, it wasn’t eagerness. He formed his mouth into an Oh and dragged his knuckles under his jaw.

  “He does not know the words, lord. May… may I try?”

  The high lord frowned but backed away. Blue Moon Dancer moved around so that Takka looked only at him, the lake, and the setting sun. It would calm the creature’s simple, scattered mind. There was a more complete person in there. The priest ached to speak with it.

  “Takka,” he took the creature’s rough hand. “You took the stone to the bottom of the lake. Do you remember?”

  Takka blinked and slowly nodded his head.

  “You did this many times today. Do you remember?”

  He blinked again.

  “The last time you did this, no, wait. The stone you just took to the bottom of the lake. You were at the bottom of the lake for a long time. Do you remember?”

  Takka’s talons wrapped around the priest’s hand. He started to pull away. The talons dug deeper. He felt them cut his skin. The tlatoani stood behind him, staring. The priest slipped his free hand into his robes and produced a necklace.

  “Takka, all is good. We are here. Blue Moon Dancer is your old friend. I saved your vegvisir for you while you were swimming for Lord Coyote.”

  The priest pulled the necklace over his head and held out the symbol. Takka’s milky eyes darkened. He stared into the open hand.

  “You know this. Do you want it back?”

  “Vegvisir. Vatn. Hallo. Quanah.” His grip tightened. “Eg sakna ljosanna a himni. Vinur, hjalpaðu mer.”

  The priest leaned up to look into his eyes. The milk was ruined by infectious strands of swirling orchid fluid. They stained his solid eyes into a haunting inverse simulacrum of a human’s, a blank white sphere surrounded by swirling purple ink. The priest’s wrist snapped. He screamed but refused to back away. He pressed the necklace to Takka’s cheek.

  “I am here. You are here. Tell me.”

  The creature fell silent. He released Blue Moon Dancer’s broken wrist. The priest dropped the necklace into his strange friend’s hand.

  “Moon hurt.”

  “I will live. Go home, Takka. We will talk more tonight. You did a good job today.”

  The creature closed his hand around the necklace.

  “Vegvisir. Find way.”

  “Yes, find your way home. Go.”

  Takka lumbered down the pier. The pair waited until he reached the city streets. Blue Moon Dancer inspected his injury. A bruise already covered his entire wrist. It would grow down to his elbow. He tried to close his fist but winced.

  “You are injured then,” Lord Coyote said while staring at the twilight sky. “But that. That was the language. Not an idiot’s repeated words but true speech. What did it mean?”

  Blue Moon Dancer set his teeth against the pain.

  “I only knew the first few words. His eyes, they changed. They were… were,” he struggled to breathe through the ache crawling into his shoulder. “They filled with the color of orchids. He looked lost. He waits for me. Lord, may I attend him?”

  Lord Coyote had turned from him to consider the sprawling city-state. The fishing fleet returned as the last light faded. Stars would soon fill the night sky, except in Tenochtitlan where the torches never went out. That city was just beginning to wake.

  “He spoke the speech, priest. He spoke the speech. You and I, we were the first to hear it. The true speech. The Unknowable God’s speech. We heard it together. You… you brought it to me.”

  He turned back to Blue Moon Dancer as he slipped a hand into his robe and produced his own necklace. The priest saw it was a clay tablet with words carved on the surface. It was an eiehuia, a word gift, given to those who the tlatoani wished to reward for superior service. He could ask for almost anything with that token and any high lord beholden to the Triple Alliance must honor it. High lords ruled the known world. All were beholden to the Alliance.

  The high lord handed the token to the priest who held it in his working hand. He was losing feeling in the broken wrist. At least the pain would subside. Now his chest screamed as those muscles tightened. It would take little to simply fall into the lake and drown right now. It might even be peaceful. Then his shattered arm would stop hurting.

  “You know what this is. I give it to you both as gift and as security, for the wonders you have brought to us and for the wonders yet to come. It will protect you from any harm, if that is what you wish. It could save your wife and young daughter from any ill within the collective might of the civilized world. Go, now. See the physician and then attend to Takka. Learn what he will tell you. Learn the language of his god. Bring it to me and your name will live forever until the world ends and the cycle begins again.”

  ◆◆◆

  Blue Moon Dancer woke with a rattling cough. He reached for the hidden knife below his straw bed mat before realizing the deathly s
ound came from his own lungs. He wheezed, wiped a strand of spit from his lips, and eased to his feet. Men were not meant to live so long. They were meant to die in service before time ruined their bodies.

  He had been trained as a warrior before he became a priest. Before Takka. Before his daughter. Before this terrible drought and the rising revolts among the numerous altepetl, those his city’s arrogant leadership called the deer people. Those lesser city-states should know better. He knew better, after a lifetime spent in quiet resistance to Tenochtitlan’s all-powerful priesthood. None could argue against the rain. But now the rain hadn’t come all season. It barely fell the season before. No man, it seemed, was all-powerful now.

  Just the day before, he walked across the very dam Takka helped build to the middle of the lake. Perhaps they had not sacrificed enough, as the tlatoani believed. Perhaps blood did not make rain, as Blue Moon Dancer believed and had taught Takka.

  The old priest wrapped a shawl around his bony shoulders and limped to the temple. This had to work. He considered stopping by his guest quarters to check on the traveler. She was older than he was and almost blind. Her journey from the northern frontier took months. She slept for three days after she arrived. Blue Moon Dancer wondered if she would ever awake. There was nothing else he could do to help Takka wake up.

  Today was the day, was it not? The women were out in full force with their baskets of colorful paints. They would stain the lintels of their doors with crimson and rust. The gods could not resist the symbolic blood. They would hang flower strands, at least those who could find flowers in the withered countryside, around the necks of anyone who would let them. They would sing their chirping chants while they worked.

  Those women were gaunt. Blue Moon Dancer rubbed his hollow stomach. Everyone was gaunt. The high lords grew lean, though slower than the common folk. Even the priesthood grumbled. A small justice.

  He nodded to a neighbor whose name he did not remember. She smiled and straightened her hair. She was hoping for a blessing from her local shaman. All these people thought he somehow controlled Takka, even manipulated him. Takka barely controlled himself. The poet king Nezhuacoyotl’s building projects had inspired the creature. But Lord Coyote was dead now and Tenochtitlan’s relations with his home city were strained to violence. All while Takka lost himself inside his mind.

  The temple neared. The priests would not let him be too far away, even in his quasi-exile. They had not banned him from the city, threatened him with sacrifice, or actually declared any punishment for his heresy. He was too important, because of Takka. The beast inside the stone man would rage if he thought Blue Moon Dancer was gone.

  The priest coughed again as fresh fire bloomed in his chest. The beast would rage soon, then. Physicians assured him it was merely a cough but the priest knew the biologic arts as well as the spiritual. This was his death rattle. How had he become old? The eiehuia thumped his chest. Its carvings were almost invisible after so many years rubbing against his tunic. Yes, this was his great gift. He fingered the tablet. It was a blessing to ask for anything in the vast power of the Triple Alliance. Why had he not asked?

  “Sahagun, halt. No one is permitted entrance.”

  Blue Moon Dancer looked up. He was at the temple’s entrance. The towering stair-stepped Templo Mayor pyramid loomed above him. Its evening shadow could blanket the entire city. Did they need such a thing? How many slaves died while building this thing? They could have built better things but the other high lords lacked Lord Coyote’s audacity, his genius, his understanding of architecture. They built nothing in these harder days. The dark tunnel waited. He started to proceed through the guards’ crossed spears.

  “Sahagun, halt. No one is…”

  The priest waved a hand. He knew the first guard, a son of his dead wife’s cousin or something similar. He had a ridiculous name. Blue Moon Dancer noticed the feathers on his spear quivering. The other guard was unknown. The priest considered the man he did not know.

  “Does the idiot statue still stare at the wall or has he tried to escape?”

  The guard’s jaw clenched.

  “Tell me then, what else have you observed of his behavior on this day that he is to be sacrificed so that we might apparently have rain?”

  “The high priests have declared it. We will have rain.”

  His spear began to quiver.

  “Indeed they have. The quetzalcoatls are never wrong, are they? Certainly they have been correct these past two years as the streets are washed with the blood of slaves but no rain comes. Is it simply a superior sacrifice they require? Tell me.”

  Speaking so much was certain to make the burning in his chest worse. The boy needed to break soon or he would have to find another way.

  “I… Sahagun, halt. No one is permitted entrance.”

  Blue Moon Dancer scowled. He felt loose skin shift on his balding head. This took too long.

  “Sahagun, yes. Such an ambiguous term. On the one hand, a black wizard. One who dabbles in the darker stains of our great commune with the gods. On the other,” he pointed to his wife’s cousin’s something or other, “The highest of priests. One who speaks directly with your war god Huitzilopochtli. Either way, I study black things. Dead things. Is this your choice today?”

  The guard stared past him down the avenue. Other guards had noticed their prolonged discussion but none approached. There were benefits to being a tainted priest.

  “Speak, boy! Takka must be prepared. If we give the gift but he is not prepared, the rains will not come, we will be short a master builder, and you… yes, what is your name?”

  “Fall…” He looked to his companion, who shrugged. “Falling Eagle.”

  “Yes, thank you. Then you, Falling Eagle, will be named for sacrifice as one who ruined our gift to Tlaloc. You will be bound to the inglorious dead for all your afterlife. The Realm of Mictlan awaits. Take your choice, Falling Eagle.”

  This was his only chance. The high priests lacked the wisdom to specifically ban the old priest from Takka. The spears retreated. Blue Moon Dancer hobbled down the hall. He placed a quivering hand on the boy’s firm arm. Everything was solid and strong compared to his own ancient, quaking body.

  “Thank you, Falling Eagle. May you spend your eternity with the sun itself.”

  Takka sat on the floor of an empty, windowless room, staring at a wall. A single brazier cast weak fire light. The priest couldn’t help his smile. The sitting man looked like an idiot instead of a tormented soul trapped inside a hell-forged prison.

  How long had it been? A year, at least. The power of the quetzalcoatls was terrifying in these more troublesome times. They could separate the lifelong friends but even they could not undo the damage he had done. Takka had the idea now. If it had taken root then it could grow. The priest rapped a knuckle on the doorframe.

  “Blue Moon Dancer!”

  Takka was on his feet. A crumble of stone fell as he rose. The priest noticed a pile of dust around where he was sitting. He was beginning to change. So the idea did take root, then.

  “Oh Takka, it is good to see you! Do you know what today is?”

  “Rain day.”

  Takka wrapped his arms around the priest and squeezed. Blue Moon Dancer remembered to tap his friend’s ribs to signal the hug was becoming painful. Takka released him.

  “Yes, rain day. Do you remember where rain comes from?”

  The creature blinked. He looked down to his own rib cage and back to his friend.

  “Blood not make rain,” he growled.

  Blue Moon Dancer grinned.

  “So you do remember. Yes, blood does not make rain. You were sitting in that spot long enough to shed some stone. Have you been dreaming? Tell me.”

  Takka looked back to his seat. His sharp fingers found the center of his chest. He started to drag his knuckles under his chin to signal he needed a new word but the priest stopped him.

  “You know the words. Tell me.”

  “Always dream.”
<
br />   “You always dream. Say it.”

  “I always dream.”

  The creature stuttered when he referred to himself. It was still such a struggle. Takka cupped his hands together as if he held water.

  “I always dream of seed.” He brought the cup to his chest. “Dream of seed in me.”

  “What does this seed become?”

  The cupped hands took flight.

  “Tree!”

  “And what becomes of you?”

  The priest held his breath. It had to be different this time because this would be the last time. There were no more chances to wake his friend from this stupor. He had to remember. For the ten thousandth time in his long life, Blue Moon Dancer wanted to cry for Takka because he had no idea what the creature needed to remember. How much had he lost? How much had he ever known?

  “I am… I am…”

  He mouthed an Oh and dragged his knuckles under his chin. Blue Moon Dancer started to interrupt but Takka took his wrist. The priest braced for pain that did not come. He could not heal from another broken bone. The wrist had never truly recovered. Both ankles ached. He was certain his breathing burned because of so many cracked ribs. His bones would not heal again. They were out of time.

  Takka stared at him. The priest inspected his eyes for any sign of the infecting purple fluid. The eyes were solid white. Takka gestured again.

  “You truly do not know the words. But then that means… this is a new idea! Oh gods known and unknown, Takka! You have seen something new. Try to tell me. Use the words you know.”

  “Seed here. Seed grow. Tree grow.” He released the priest’s wrist. “I am… I am tree. I grow.”

  His neck spasmed but he took his own head in his rough hands and held it steady. He was not going away this time. Blue Moon Dancer removed the eiehuia and then the necklace he wore below it and handed the second necklace to Takka.

  “The high priests took this from you a long time ago. Do you remember? It is your vegvisir. It helps you find your way.”

  Takka dragged a fingertip across the sigil’s lines, north to south, east to west, and along every hook, angle, and corner that grew from those cardinal lines.