Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

I was not looking at them any more. Before the priest had finished speaking, I was running as fast as I could towards the shore of the lake and the causeway that would take me back to the city.

It was dark by the time I reached Pochtlan. I ran much of the way. In my anxiety to put as much distance between myself and the Otomies I did not stop even to urinate. When I finally stumbled, gasping, to a halt, beside the canal that skirted the merchants’ parish, I was desperate.

I might simply have used the canal, but Aztec modesty prevented me. For a moment I hesitated, shifting my weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, until I saw the solution. A wooden bridge spanned the waterway and at the far end of the bridge, in the featherworkers’ parish of Amantlan, stood a wicker shelter.

I trotted towards it. Others might have hesitated, mindful of tales of demons that caught men during night-time trips to the latrines, hideous female dwarfs whose appearance heralded sickness and death, but my need was urgent enough to overcome such fears.

The frost had made the bridge’s planks slippery and treacherous, forcing me to take short, shuffling steps across it, with my eyes fixed on my feet.

The bridge shook. A tremor ran up both my calves and told me I was not alone. I looked up and the next moment was fighting to keep my footing as my legs shot out from under me.

A god glared silently at me from the far end of the bridge.

I cried out in shock and dread. Even while the rational part of my mind was telling me that what I saw was easy to explain, something older was shouting it down: the terror I had known as a little child, staring up at the fearsome idols in their niches in my parents’ house, and the lore drilled into me in the House of Tears, when I had learned the harsh ways of the gods while sacrificial blood streamed from my tongue and earlobes and shins and penis.

Smoke or steam wreathed the god’s face. Glittering scales fell one over another across his skin. Long, blue-green plumes, each as stiff and sharp as a spear-point, crowned his headdress and towered over his conical fur cap. His eyes were perfect black circles, whose gaze seemed to pass over and through me as indifferently as if I were a thing so insignificant as to have no meaning in his world. Savage fangs, curved like the young Moon, guarded his yawning, ravenous mouth. There was no tongue but I thought I saw something moving inside that dark maw, something that threatened to uncoil and snap out at me with the speed of a lash.

He came towards me through a cloud that thickened and swirled as he spoke.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ he cried. His voice was muffled, as though coming from inside a cave.

My legs finally gave way and I toppled backward, crashing on to the hard wood with a shout of pain and fear. The bridge bucked under me. For a moment I lay staring straight up at the stars, with my arms spread out and my palms flat on the floor.

Whimpering with fright, I struggled to get to my feet, falling backward twice before my hands and heels got any sort of a purchase on the slippery wood. I sat bolt upright and stared wide eyed at the empty bridge ahead of me and the entirely empty road beyond it.

I blinked several times to clear my vision.

There was nothing to see.

I hauled myself to my feet, slipping over more than once, and half ran, half slid to the end of the bridge, careless of the fact that a false step could send me tumbling into the canal’s icy water. I staggered on to dry land.

The waters of the canal, hidden from view by its high banks, lapped loudly. I wondered at the splashing sound for a moment, as there was no wind and nothing to disturb the water’s surface, but then I thought that in the empty silence of the night all noises would be magnified, and concentrated on what I could see.

I was in Amantlan now. The featherworkers’ homes stood in a single uninterrupted row in front of me. None showed any sign of wakefulness and there were no dark passageways between them that a man or a god could be hiding in.

I let out a long breath and watched it cloud the air in front of me and slowly disperse.

‘Vanished into thin air,’ I grunted. I felt a renewed jab of fear. I had no difficulty recognizing what I had seen. No Aztec could have mistaken it.

‘Nonsense,’ I told myself. ‘He must be around here somewhere. He’s hiding, that’s all. If I wait long enough I’ll see the bastard.’

But it sounded hollow. However hard I tried, I could not convince myself that I had not seen what others had seen: the Feathered Serpent, the Precious Twin, the Lord of the Wind.

‘Quetzalcoatl?’ I whispered. ‘Why?’

If the god of wisdom, the god who had created mankind by mixing his own blood with ground-up bones he had stolen from the Lord of the Underworld, was abroad in the city, what could this mean? The god bore the same name as the last king of the Toltecs, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, our own Emperor Montezuma’s predecessor. It had long been rumoured that theToltec king had never died, but had fled his realm vowing one day to return and reclaim what was his. Did what I had just seen somehow portend the end of Montezuma’s reign? If it did, what would come after it?

I let out a long, shuddering breath, and looked down, feeling a chill about my loins. I realized wryly that I no longer needed the latrine after all.

I discarded my breechcloth, replacing it with a strip of maguey fibre ripped from the bottom of my old cloak. Then, feeling naked and chilly but with my modesty still essentially preserved, I crossed the bridge again and went to meet the old man who had sent me the knife.

Kindly’s was the only house in Pochtlan that I knew well. Until recently he had lived here with Lily and Shining Light. Lily had lost her husband many years before on a trading venture. Since then she had run the household more or less alone. Her son had grown up, despite all her care, into a dissolute monster, and her father, the household’s nominal head, was an old man close to senility who made full use of the licence the law gave him to drink all the sacred wine he could hold.

Once, briefly, Lily and I had slaked each other’s despair and loneliness. The moment had passed, swept away like leaves on a flooding river by a tide of feelings — her care for her son, mine for my own survival — but it had left its mark. Now I found it hard to approach this house without thinking of its mistress as she had been then, and afterwards: coolly courageous in her determination to find her worthless boy, utterly broken in her grief over his body.

I swallowed once. I had no need to be nervous, I told myself. I was not entering this house as a trespasser, as I had once before. I had been summoned here. I gripped the bronzeknife and stepped over the threshold, with my head darting to left and right as if I expected to be ambushed.

Nothing moved in the shadows around me. I allowed myself to relax, until a querulous old man’s voice snapped at me out of the darkness.

‘There you are! Took your bloody time, didn’t you?’

I started. After everything I had seen and done that day, culminating in the apparition on the bridge, it was as much as I could do not to turn and run. I made myself stand still, while my breathing slowed and the pounding in my chest settled down to a normal rhythm, before I replied.

‘Kindly? Is that you?’

I was answered by a shuffling noise, a harsh growl as of someone clearing his throat and about to spit, and a shadowy movement that gradually became a little, bent figure coming into the starlight in the middle of the courtyard. It was hard to make his face out in the gloom, but even if I had not known his voice, I could have guessed who he was from the sour reek of his breath.