Peggy Nicholson - A Serpent In Turquoise

“Raine. Raine Ashaway. You wrote me about the temple at Teotihuacan, and yes, the Feathered Serpent looks like a dinosaur.”

Bang!

“Oh!” She lunged for McCord and hung on as the Land Rover swerved. “What was—?”

“That was my left headlight clipping the mountainside. So do you know of any place in the Copper Canyons where such a beast might have been found?”

She was no longer seeing triple. He had wonderful lips, though she knew that already. The man was a natural-born kisser. “What’s your angle on this?”

“Aw, jeez—you’re going to hold out on me, after I risked my neck to rescue you?”

“I never said that.” But was she?

“So say it! ‘McCord, I owe you my life. If I know where to find a dinosaur, it’s yours with a bow on it.’ Or would you rather I turn around and hang you back in the tree where I found you?”

Dear Reader,

Sometimes it’s hard to say goodbye to a particularly vivid character. After An Angel in Stone, I meant to put professional bone hunter Raine Ashaway on the back burner, and move on to her younger sister Jaye. But then while prospecting for my next plot, I happened on a book on the Aztecs. I flipped to a page and there was a photo of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, aka the Feathered Serpent. Good Lord, I thought, that carving looks like a dinosaur!

Next thing I knew, Raine had dashed off to the Copper Canyons of Mexico to check out the situation. A long, tall, wise-mouthed renegade Texan came wandering in from left field with his own agenda. I found a charming villain with a weakness for hummingbirds and…

Well, anyway, sometimes all an author can do is run at her heroine’s heels, taking dictation as fast as the adventure happens. This was that kind of story. Hope you enjoy it!

Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

grew up in Texas with plans to be an astronaut, a jockey or a wild animal collector. Instead she majored in art at Brown University in Rhode Island (LARGE welded sculptures), then restored and lived aboard a 1920s wooden sailboat for ten years. She has worked as a high school art teacher, a chef to the country’s crankiest nonagenarian millionaire, a waitress in an oyster bar and a full-time author. Her interests include antique rose gardening, Korat cats, ethnic cooking, offshore sailing and—but naturally!—reading romances. She says, “The best thing about writing is that, in the midst of life’s worst pratfalls and disasters, I can always say, ‘Wow, what a story this’ll make!’” You can write to Peggy at P.O. Box 675, Newport, RI 02840.

To Ron duPrey, stars in his bow wave, attended by dolphins, reaching toward the dawn. Fair winds, my darling.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Tenochtitlan, Valley of Mexico. Spring, 1520 A.D.

“T his Cortés is a man, I say, and not a god! All this foolish talk in the marketplace that he is the Quetzalcoatl—pah!” The high priest spat into the brazier’s flames. “You have only to look at his eyes, how they glow when he sees our gold! He burns for it like a boy in rut. He’s no sort of a god. He’s a soulless, hairy dog of an unbeliever, come to rob the Aztecs of all but their clouts!”

“If you say so, my lord.” Like most traders, the pochteca was a practical man. He believed in a fair weight of cacao beans, and the sheen of parrot feathers. A leather pouch clicking with turquoise or coral. He’d leave the gods and their savage requirements to the bloody priests. One had to make a living in this world before he faced the gods in the next, he knew, though he’d never dare give voice to such an opinion.

“I do say it. But though this Cortés is a man, he brings our ruin. The city will fall.”

The trader grunted in surprise. “I heard Cortés had fled, he and his men. After they murdered King Motecuhzoma. That they’d been driven from the city and were running for the east.” The pochteca had returned only this morning from a profitable venture to the western ocean. He’d barely had time to bathe himself, then hurry his laughing young wife to bed, before the summons had come from the temple. From the high priest of Quetzalcoatl himself!

“Cortés will return, with more warriors than the fire ants. We have asked the one true Feathered Serpent, the real Quetzalcoatl, and so he says. Tenochtitlan will fall. Our men will be trampled like corn stalks beneath the hooves of their terrible beasts. Our women will be driven weeping into slavery. Our children will be meat for their sacrifice.”

The pochteca swallowed a protesting laugh. One didn’t laugh at a priest and live. “The god says this?” he asked weakly. Or his old women priests putting words into the Quetzalcoatl’s mouth? Tenochtitlan was the finest, largest city in all the world, home to two hundred thousand of the bravest. Floating like a lily on its lake, the imperial capital could be approached only by guarded causeways or by canoe. To think that it could fall to a handful of rude, hairy, sweat-soaked foreigners? What nonsense.

“Already our end has begun. The strangers send a poison through the air before them. The people to the east of here breathe it and die—an illness of coughing and fever and spots on the face. The city will fall, says the Serpent. He says that if His children would survive this plague, they must return from whence they came. To Aztlan, the Place of the Herons.”

“Aztlan,” the trader repeated without inflection. Aztlan was no more than a tale to tell children. A fading dream of a homeland somewhere far to the north. Hundreds of rainy seasons ago the Aztecs had abandoned that city, but nobody remembered where it was located or why they’d fled. They’d marched south for year upon year till at last they came to an island in a lake, where they spied an eagle perched on a nopal cactus, devouring a serpent. There they’d stopped and founded Tenochtitlan, which became the navel of their empire.

But the pochteca had ventured north and west as far as a sensible man might walk in four moons of hard walking and he’d never heard a whisper of Aztlan. If such a place existed, he’d have learned of it. It would have markets same as any city, markets hungry for all the goods he traded and sold. A real city couldn’t live on air. If ever the Place of the Herons had existed, it must have crumbled to dust. Its birds had flown.

“We return to Aztlan, those of us who have the vision and foresight to know what’s coming. The courage to do what must be done. And you will lead the way.”

The pochteca found spit enough to speak. “I, my lord? I—I don’t deserve such an honor. I’m only a poor pochteca, a lowly merchant in obsidian and—”

“You will go before us, guiding an expedition that carries the temple treasure and the Feathered One himself. You will take your men and such priests and soldiers as I choose, to serve and guard the Quetzalcoatl as you travel.”

His wife. Her feet were dainty as a deer’s, softer than turkey down. And she was only beginning to swell with their first child. She’d never be strong enough to make a journey to nowhere, trudging north over mountain and desert for the gods knew how long—for years and dusty years?