Christopher Evans - Aztec Century

Victoria was broken, her mind finally destroyed by what had been done to Alex. I realized this when she emptied her bladder on the bed and had to be led into the bathroom and undressed like a child. After that first shock reaction, she became docile, but, though I tried, I could not get her to utter a single word. She watched my mouth as I spoke, as a young baby might, but never reacted to what I was saying. I didn’t even know if she understood me.

There was soap and fresh towels in the bathroom. The wardrobes were stocked with clean sheets and clothing for both of us, well-tailored but undemonstrative fashions, manufactured in London, Paris and Milan rather than Amecameca or Potomac or Shanghai. The brand names were entirely unfamiliar.

I got Victoria downstairs and sat her in an armchair. The cottage was centrally heated, but I wrapped a blanket around her for extra comfort. I was extremely hungry, and presumed that she was too, though she gave no sign. But before I set to preparing us a meal, I quickly scouted the spacious surroundings of the cottage, looking for any lurking figures, hoping to find whoever had brought us here hovering nearby, keeping us under surveillance. The cottage stood alone, surrounded by fields, with a terrace of houses and a redbrick school on the hillside above us. There was no one in sight.

I heated some tomato soup, then opened a can of curried vegetables, which we ate with rice. Since arriving here I haven’t eaten meat or served it to Victoria. I remember only too well our final supper, and I think of Alex, and of the pre-Christian Aztec ceremonial rite which reputedly included the eating of the flesh of the sacrificial victim. Human flesh is said to resemble pork in flavour, and rich sauces make many meats indistinguishable from one another. It does not bear dwelling on.

Victoria was ravenous, gulping her soup and ripping slices of bread apart to cram into her mouth. I continued to feel a kind of inner brightness and stillness which I suspected were the aftereffects of whatever drugs had been fed to us in our last meal. The Aztecs were expert in the use of hallucinogenics, and it would have been easy for them to incorporate fungi and other narcotic plants into the dishes we had eaten – peyotl , probably, and ololiuhqui , and the sacred fungus teonanacatl . No doubt there were others, carefully chosen to keep us stupefied yet distracted with visions. I found it impossible to separate what had really happened from what were products of my own drugged imaginings. Everything I could remember seemed slightly unreal.

For the first three days I did nothing except remain in the cottage with Victoria, learning to care for her and attempting to get my bearings. Victoria required little attention except at mealtimes; she soon learned how to use the bathroom, to wash and dress herself, and she sat contentedly in front of the television for hours, watching whatever programmes were showing with a faint, vacant smile. Though she began to respond to me and seemed to understand simple instructions, she never spoke.

The study held a wall of books, some old, some new. There was an atlas and a gazetteer, guides to South Wales and Gwent, a one-volume history of the world, big coffee-table books on literature, the cinema and popular art. And, of course, there were titles on Mexico and the Aztecs, at least two dozen of them. These, and the sunflower painting, were not-so-subtle forms of Aztec mockery, I was certain. The painting, famous in this world, I later discovered, was unknown in mine.

I scouted the area around the cottage whenever I was able, avoiding contact with the locals. One of the guidebooks told me that the terrace of houses was the village of Troedrhiwgair, again unknown in my world. The people were Welsh, but English-speaking, dressed in a recognizable style of clothing, while the television revealed the manners and mores and means of speaking in this Britain as no different from the one I had left.

It was March here, as on our world, and I was able to calculate that two days had passed between Extepan’s coronation and my waking up in the cottage. Two whole days of nothing except the sound of the Aztec voice in my waking sleep, telling me what I could expect. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the actuality.

It rained for the rest of the week, and I spent much of my time sitting with Victoria, watching news reports and current affairs programmes, perusing book after book, studying their illustrations and photographs minutely, fascinated and dislocated by every fact, small or large, which forced me to accept that we had indeed been cast adrift on a different Earth.

And how different! How mundanely yet stunningly different. Its landscapes and histories echo my own, there are places and names and people which are familiar; yet nothing is quite the same. It is as if our destinies are separate but linked, like ghost reflections of one another, so that some people and places are famous in both – often for different reasons – others not at all. Of course, I was startled to discover that here the Aztecs are but a memory, their nascent empire destroyed by the very man who set them on the path to future greatness in my world. There is a British royal family that stems from a line of the ruling house extinguished on my Earth. Here, my great-grandfather was never born and our house at Marlborough does not exist I feel like a ghost. What could be more cruel than to inhabit a world which knows nothing of you? Extepan chose his revenge well.

There were days, especially early on, when I believed my knowledge that I was but a fiction would drive me into the same kind of madness as Victoria. Imagine, just try to imagine, living in a world that seems an invention, a parody of reality. It’s little wonder that I have become intensely mistrustful to the point of paranoia and seldom like leaving the cottage. Even less do I like having to meet people, however ordinary-looking or prosaic their concerns. A chance encounter fills me with dread; a simple ‘Good morning’ is enough to make me want to flee for fear that I might be forced into a conversation that will swiftly reveal the depths of my ignorance of this world, exposing me as a fake, an intruder, an anomaly. What could be worse than living in a place where every mundanity is an attack on memory and belief, a threat to one’s already fragile sense of self?

Yet if I thought that oblivion in this world was punishment enough, I did not realize that Extepan had reserved the subtlest cruelty for last. At the end of the first week, a maroon van came jolting down the rutted driveway to the cottage. Stomach churning with anxiety, I rushed outside as it pulled up. A man got out and smiled at me.

I went immobile with shock.

I watched him walk around to the back of the van, open the door and remove a large cardboard box filled with groceries.

It was Bevan.

He wasn’t the Bevan of my world, I knew that immediately, because he was slimmer, balder, and wore a greying beard. He carried himself differently, was less slovenly dressed, wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt, the kind of clothing which my Bevan had never favoured. But their faces were the same – the prominent jaw and ears, the small mouth – and they were the same age. They could have been twins.

He brought the box up to me, still smiling.

‘Not a bad morning, is it? They said you wanted this.’

The smile was more open, less devious, than the one I knew. He wasn’t the same man, yet it was him, it was him.

‘You’re down for weekly deliveries, that’s right, isn’t it?’

I made to speak, but first had to clear my throat.

‘Who arranged this?’

He looked a little put-out. ‘Got a call from a bloke in London, didn’t I? He said you and your sister had just moved in and wanted a regular delivery. Run the local store I do, see.’