Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

She lay down on the interior altar and waited.

Outside, the clamor of the crowd gave way to melodious singing. The lord’s procession was approaching. Neniza listened, every fiber of her body tight. The clack of spear-hafts: the lord had descended from his palanquin, and the ocelotlaca were standing guard. The chime of jewelry: he was outside the door. A sustained note from the chorus: the lord was performing the rite of bloodletting, piercing his tongue. She could smell the acrid tang as he burnt the strips of bark-paper now wetted with his blood.

Then he entered the temple.

A petitioner in the plaza could not look at the lord of the land. The Rain Bride could. Neniza sat up on the altar, and saw what she had come so far to find.

They said he could take the form of a tremendous serpent, but right now he was shaped like a man. A tall man, sleekly muscled, without the heavy shoulders of an ocelotlacatl. His skin glimmered, scales reflecting the faint light inside the temple. She could see nearly all of that skin; he wore a loincloth of jade and gold, and a pectoral, and a drape of pure white cotton hung from his arms, but his body was mostly bare. There was no hair on him anywhere, not even the smooth curve of his skull, but behind him, rustling as he shifted, Neniza could just see the iridescent quetzal feathers that ran down his back.

The sight of him, permitted to her as it was, still sent her to her knees. “Master,” she whispered, and slid from the altar to the floor.

The quetzalcoatl who ruled the land came toward her, one sinuous step after another. His presence was overpowering. Not a deity to equal the Flayed God, or any of the others honored in the rituals of the year, but not a person, either. Not like those who waited outside.

Least of all like her.

His voice startled her: not Court Speech, but heavily-accented Wide Speech. “Rise, Rain Bride,” he said. “Today we are wed.”

And so the ritual began.

He would ask for her petition later, when they went outside to complete the ritual, so that it could be publicly heard. But all Neniza wanted was this, here, now: to lie with him, just once. Peasants begged it sometimes, for fertility. The Rain Bride did it for duty.

Her entire body trembled as she rose to her feet, but not with fear. Standing all but naked before the lord, her nature awoke within her. The nature her father fought so hard to keep in check, for fear of what it would do. Male or female, whichever form they took, all of their caste felt it. For males, in the wet season, the passion was different. Safer. Kinder.

Neniza was female, in the dry season, and she was not kind.

She reached out for the feathered serpent, bold with the power that was in her, and drew him toward her, onto her, as she laid herself once more on the altar. Even had this not been their purpose here today, he could not have resisted her. She cried out as he entered her, not in pain, but in triumph.

As he moved above her, she felt her power envelop him. Women of other castes rarely if ever wanted what the males of her kind gave them—the strange, unnerving children they birthed—but it was a gift, freely given. Neniza’s rage inverted that power: she gave nothing, and took everything.

Blood dripped from the lord’s mouth where he had pierced his tongue. She licked it off her own lips, tasting his life in that blood, feeling it in his body as he rode her. Feeling it flow from him into her. The sensation was intoxicating, exhilarating; she grew drunk with that power, and a laugh built deep within her.

The feathered serpent shuddered above her, spine rippling like water. She put one hand on the scales of his chest to support his weight.

And he froze, staring at the fingers of her hand.

He tore himself free of her more quickly than she could follow, slithering down from the altar to the temple floor. “Show yourself to me!”

His voice struck her like thunder. However much she despised him, however much he despised her people, she was a woman of his domain, and he was her lord. She could not refuse his command. The power of it forced the mask of flesh from her at last, revealing what lay beneath.

Skin and muscle gave way to wood. The soft, lush body of a young alux woman dissolved, leaving behind the roughly-hewn form of a xera, like the toys children would sometimes carve for themselves before their mothers saw and took them away to be burned. In shape like a person, but not of flesh, and each hand bore only four fingers, mute testimony to the lesser, inferior, outcaste nature of her kind. She could hide anything with the mask, except that.

He bellowed something in Court Speech, and with a clattering rush the ocelotlaca were there, weapons out. Neniza did not care. She knelt on the floor where his command had left her, and she laughed.

“I am no Rain Bride to be sacrificed,” she said, proudly baring her wooden face to them all. “There is no skin to flay from me, no heart to cut out. Your rains can come or not; I do not care.”

“I will sacrifice you anyway,” the quetzalcoatl spat, his words almost unintelligible through his accent. “I will burn you, as I burned your people.”

Her rage could not overcome the power forcing her to kneel, but she snarled and jerked against it. “My father told me what you did. Yes, we live—you will never be rid of us. Not so long as one male of our kind lives to sire more xera on your women. We are always fertile. It is our gift.” She laughed again. “But I am not male. Not since I heard the tale of what you did, and knew what it is to want to kill. Where my father gives, I take. And I have taken your life. Within three days you will be dead. Burn me; I am of wood. But I have no blood from which to take your power back.”

They bound her there inside the temple, and gagged her so she could mock the lord no more. He sent the priests to choose another maiden from the crowd at the base of the mound; Neniza watched as the quetzalcoatl took her on the altar, then listened as they finished the ritual outside. The girl asked for her family to be cared for. The lord promised to honor her request. Then they cut out her heart and flayed the skin from her to bring the rains, because that was how the world worked; everything that mattered was paid for with sacrifice.

Listening to the drums that followed in the wake of the girl’s screams, Neniza wondered if her own blasphemy had tainted the ritual beyond repair. Would there be drought, famine, death?

She did not care. All that mattered was that the lord would not be there to see it.

The signs were already beginning to show when he returned that night. His sleek face was drawn, his delicate scales dulled. The spark that had been in him was in Neniza now, and nothing could take it back.

But they tried. They dragged her from the temple mound back to the palace, and there they ritually abused her wooden body, piercing and splintering it as if she were an enemy noble captured in battle. Neniza laughed at the ironic honor.

She could not bleed, though, and so in the end they did as she knew they must.

The quetzalcoatl stepped in front of her as they hauled her up. She could see the pyre looming large behind him, and shuddered uncontrollably. Watching her fear, the lord said in grim tones, “You may yet escape it. Restore me, and I will spare both you and your father.”

Her father? Neniza would have spat in his face, if her wooden mouth had any moisture in it. She was dry, so dry. Her father was a coward, soft and wet and weak. She would give nothing for his life.

“Take her,” the quetzalcoatl snarled at last, his smooth voice distorted with rage and despair.

They dragged her to the pyre and bound her at its peak, and soon the flames danced up around her, licking eagerly at her dry wooden form. She began screaming, then, and did not stop.