Dumb witness to this exchange, still stretched across the sacrificial stone and awaiting the first cut, the next victim trembled. Nonetheless, Moctezuma noted approvingly, he continued to hold himself under some sort of control. That took courage. He raised the obsidian dagger and plunged it deep into the man’s bare chest, delighting in his screams as he sawed the blade savagely upwards, splitting the breastbone and exposing the palpitating heart.
‘Watch and be thankful as the Great Speaker of the Mexica takes your life,’ whispered Moctezuma. He began to cut again, busy now, with his nose in the gaping chest cavity, working close-up with the knife, soaked in streams of blood, severing the thick vessels that encircled the beating heart until the whole quivering, dripping organ came loose in his hands and he flung it on the brazier where it hissed and smoked.
Priests rolled the body away; even as they were butchering it, a new victim was dragged into place over the sacrificial stone.
Out of the corner of his eye Moctezuma saw Ahuizotl leaving the summit of the pyramid with three of his black-robed entourage – no doubt to round up the women he’d demanded for sacrifice.
‘Wait,’ he called after them.
Ahuizotl turned to look back.
‘Before you bring me the women,’ said Moctezuma, ‘you will bring me the Flesh of the Gods.’
Sometimes, an hour or two before being sacrificed, specially favoured victims were fed the mushrooms called teonanácatl, the ‘Flesh of the Gods’, which unleashed fearsome visions of deities and demons.
More rarely, the sacrificer himself would partake of the mushrooms.
After he had killed the last of the fifty-two young men, Moctezuma received a runner sent by Ahuizotl, who had climbed the pyramid to bring him a linen bag containing seven fat, finger-length mushrooms. Their silver-grey fish-belly skins gave way to shades of blue and purple around the stems. They exuded a faint, bitter, woody aroma.
Seven big teonanácatl amounted, Moctezuma knew, to a sizeable, probably terrifying, dose, but he was prepared to eat them to engineer an encounter with Hummingbird, war god of the Mexica, whose representative on earth he was. In the early days of his reign the god had come to him often as a disembodied voice speaking inside his head, present at every sacrifice, giving him commands, guiding him in every decision he took, but as the years passed the voice became fainter and more distant and, for the last five years, as the ominous year One-Reed slowly approached, he had not heard it at all.
Priests were still hovering round him but Moctezuma ordered them away, telling them he required two hours of perfect peace before the next bout of sacrifices began.
He watched as they filed down the steps. When complete silence fell he stripped off his sodden loincloth and advanced naked into the shadows of Hummingbird’s temple, clutching the bag of mushrooms.
The temple, which was built on the broad summit of the pyramid, was a tall stone building. Its two principal rooms were luridly illuminated by the guttering flames of burning torches.
Moctezuma put a mushroom in his mouth and began to chew. It tasted of death, of decay. He added two more and walked into the first room.
Lined up on both sides of the wall, skewered from ear to ear on long horizontal poles, taking their place amongst other, older trophies, were the dripping heads of the fifty-two men he’d spent the morning killing. He remembered some of their faces. Their wide, staring eyes. Their mouths frozen as they screamed their last.
He confronted one of the heads, pushed right up to it, glared into the vacant eyes, wiped blood from the high cheekbones and thin lips.
It made him feel powerful to encounter the so-recently living.
He moved on, into the second room.
Here, curiously patterned in the light and shadow cast by the flickering torches and the high, narrow windows, with a huge serpent fashioned from pearls and precious stones coiled about its waist, was Hummingbird’s squat and massive idol. Carved from solid granite, its eyes, tusks, teeth, claws, feathers and scales glittered with jade, polished horn and obsidian and the most precious gold and jewels; a golden bow was clutched in its right fist, a sheaf of golden arrows in its left, and a necklace of human hearts, hands and skulls was strung around its neck. The idol’s snarling mouth was smeared with gore and lumps of meat where priests had forced the half-cooked hearts of the victims through it into the reeking receptacle beyond.
Moctezuma sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the great idol and slowly and methodically ate the rest of the mushrooms.
For a very long time nothing happened. Then at last the disembodied voice he thought had deserted him was back inside his head:
‘Do you bring me hearts?’ the voice asked.
Chapter Five
Tenochtitlan, Thursday 18 February 1519
‘This medicine is bitter,’ complained Coyotl. ‘Why must I finish it?’
‘Because I say you must finish it,’ said Tozi. ‘I who obtained it for you at great expense. It will take away your pain.’
‘How great was the expense, Tozi?’ The little boy, who should have been born a merchant, was always inquisitive about anything to do with barter and exchange.
‘It was very great, Coyotl.’ Greater than you can possibly know. ‘Pay me back by finishing it.’
‘But I hate it, Tozi. It tastes of … uggh – bird shit!’
‘So you’re some kind of expert on the taste of bird shit?’
Coyotl giggled: ‘It tastes like this medicine you are forcing me to eat.’ Despite his protests, he had already swallowed almost the whole first dose of the noxious-smelling red paste. He was stretched out quite comfortably on the ground, with his head in Tozi’s lap, and he now unwillingly ate the rest of the drug.
Coyotl was six years old. He was in the women’s pen, rather than amongst the males, because his genitals had been hacked off in infancy by his parents, leaving only a slit. This had been done as an offering to Tezcatlipoca, ‘Smoking Mirror’, Lord of the Near and the Nigh. Four days ago those same loving parents had dedicated the rest of their son to the war god Hummingbird, whose temple stood on the summit of the great pyramid, and had delivered him to the fattening pen to await sacrifice. The other women in the pen had shunned him, as they did all freaks and oddities, but Tozi had taken him under her wing and they had become friends.
‘You need to sleep now!’ she said. ‘Give the medicine a chance to do its work.’
‘Sleep!’ Coyotl’s response was high-pitched and indignant. ‘I don’t think so.’ But his eyes were already drooping closed.
Tozi was seated cross-legged. She blinked, rubbed her aching temples and yawned. She felt dizzy, perhaps a little sick. Though she had sustained it only for a five count, her brief, intense fade had exhausted her more than she’d realised. Her head nodded forward, sleep overmastered her and she dreamed, as she often did, of her mother the witch. In the dream, her mother was with her still, comforting her, teaching her and then, strangely, whispering in her ear, ‘Wake up, wake up …’
‘Wake up!’
It was not her mother’s voice! The moment of confusion between dream and reality passed and Tozi, now fully alert, found herself face to face with the beautiful young woman who’d haunted her earlier. ‘You …’ she began.
Then she choked back her words.
Behind the woman, less than fifty paces away, four of the black-robed priests of Hummingbird had entered the pen, followed by armed enforcers, and were hauling fresh victims aside.
Although momentarily preoccupied with other prisoners, the priests were moving fast and making straight for them.
‘Are you going to let them kill us?’ the woman said. She spoke in a throaty whisper, her voice low and filled with urgent power. ‘Or are you going to make us disappear?’
Tozi winced as a burst of pain struck her head. ‘Us?’ she said as the spasm passed. ‘What us?’
‘You, me and the little one,’ said the woman. She glanced down at Coyotl, who stirred and grumbled i
n his sleep. ‘Make us disappear the way you make yourself disappear.’
‘If I could make myself disappear, do you think I’d still be in this prison?’
‘That’s your business,’ the woman said. ‘But I saw what happened this morning. I saw you fade. Then you were gone.’
The woman was crouched next to her, her sleek black hair shadowing her face, her body emanating a warm, intense musk, and for the second time that day, Tozi felt the dangerous pull of a connection, as though she had known her all her life. Making no sudden movements that might attract unwelcome attention, she looked round, taking stock of their predicament, automatically tuning in to the feverish agitation of the crowd, probing to see if there was something she could use.
Whatever it was, it could not be another fade. She cursed herself for employing the spell of invisibility earlier, when it had not been a matter as desperate as this. But with her head pounding so very badly, Tozi knew it would be at least another day, perhaps two, before she dared risk it again.
The pen was massively overcrowded and the sudden arrival of the priests at this unexpected hour had sparked off a mindstorm of fear. Most prisoners knew not to bolt – that was the fastest way to be selected for sacrifice – but there was a general cringing and drawing back, as from the approach of a savage beast.
Tozi recognised the high priest Ahuizotl in the lead, a vigorous, evil-looking, mean-mouthed old man with mottled skin. His black robes and thick, shoulder-length grey hair glistened with oozing curds of freshly clotted gore, and his blunt, bestial face was set in an expression of thunderous rage. Flanked by his three assistants, also copiously smeared and splashed with blood, he cut a swathe across the crowded floor of the pen, selecting women – all young – whom he pointed out with furious jabs of his spear. Armed enforcers at once restrained the protesting, terrified, screaming victims and led them off.
‘I can only hide two of us from them,’ Tozi volunteered abruptly, ‘but I can’t hide three. So it’s you, or the kid.’
The woman pushed back her hair and a ray of sunlight, lancing deep into the prison through some crack in the roof, caught flecks of jade and gold in her irises and set her eyes ablaze. ‘You must save the child of course,’ she said.
It was the right answer.
‘I lied,’ Tozi whispered to the woman, ‘I think I can get all three of us out of this. Anyway I’m going to try.’
‘But …’
‘Stay still. Whatever happens, you have to stay still. You have to stay quiet.’
Tozi glanced up. Ahuizotl was pushing towards them, just twenty paces away, every angry lunge of his spear nominating another victim. This was a man who’d taken countless lives for Hummingbird and Tozi sensed his blood power. He would not be easy to deflect or confuse.
Neither were the younger priests to be underestimated, with their cruel sneers and long, lean fingers.
So she scanned groups of prisoners milling nearby and her eyes fell, with a feeling of real gratitude, on Xoco and two of her gang. They were off to the left, trying, like everyone else, not to attract the attention of the priests.
Tozi started to sing. ‘Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hm … Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hmm.’ The sound was so low as to be almost inaudible. But it didn’t matter how quiet or how loud you sang it. What mattered was the sequence of the notes, the tempo of their repetition and the intent of the singer.
Tozi’s intent was to save herself, and poor Coyotl and this strange, mysterious woman. She cared nothing for Xoco. ‘Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hm,’ she sang. ‘Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hmm.’ She kept winding up the tempo, as her mother had taught her, and felt the fog flowing out of her, invisible like breath, unsettling the senses and lightening the heads of everyone it touched. People stumbled, collapsed, barged into one another, became aggressive and reckless, and the priests of Hummingbird spun round seeking the source of the commotion. Then the mental fog slammed into Xoco who started up from the floor where she was crouching and charged straight at Ahuizotl. He was too surprised to avoid her and when she hit him with all her weight he went down hard, smashing his head into the ground.
Chaos erupted as priests fought to subdue and shackle Xoco. She seemed supernaturally strong and howled like a demon. There were not enough enforcers to stop the many other fights spreading like wildfire through the crowd.
‘Now we get out of here,’ said Tozi. She swept up Coyotl, still in a deep sleep, and signalled to the woman to follow her.
Chapter Six
The Kingdom of Tlascala, Thursday 18 February 1519
The hill was steep, filled with hollows and overgrown with tall, feathery grass. That was why Shikotenka had been drawn to it. He’d found a deep crevice about halfway up the slope and snaked his lean, hard-muscled body into it just as dawn was breaking, hiding himself completely from view to observe the Mexica as they converged in the vast natural amphitheatre below. There were four regiments, each at their full strength of eight thousand men, and he counted them in as they approached one by one through passes in the surrounding hills, a huge and fearsome war machine the size of a city, mustering here as the day wore on to bring murder and mayhem to Tlascala.
Dressed only in a loincloth and sandals, his thick black hair drawn back from his brow in long, matted braids, Shikotenka’s chest, abdomen, legs and arms, now pressed tightly into the soil and rock of his homeland, were criss-crossed with the scars of battle wounds received in hand-to-hand combat against the Mexica. At thirty-three years of age he had already been a warrior for seventeen years. The experience showed in the flat, impassive planes of his face and the determined set of his wide, sensual mouth, which masked equally the cold cruelty and calculation of which he was capable as well as the bravery, resolve and inspired flights of rash brilliance that had led to his election, just a month before, as the battle king of Tlascala. A man of direct action, he had not thought of delegating a subordinate for today’s assignment. The very survival of his people depended on what happened in the next day and night and he would trust this task to no one else.
Eyes narrowed, he watched as teams from the first of the enemy regiments used ropes and pegs to mark out the perimeter of a great circle on the open plain. The circle was then divided into four segments. Thereafter as each regiment arrived it was directed to its own segment of the circle, and the men at once set about pitching tents that varied in size from compact two-man units to enormous marquees and pavilions, where the standards of leading officers were raised. Meanwhile scouts were sent out in small, fast-moving squads to comb the nearby hills for spies and ambushes. Five times already, men beating the bush had passed uncomfortably close to where Shikotenka lay hidden.
Was it possible, he wondered, to hate an entire people as intensely as he hated the Mexica, and yet still admire them?
Their organisation, for example. Their toughness. Their efficiency. Their obsidian-hard will. Their absolute, ruthless, uncompromising commitment to power. Their limitless capacity for violence.
Weren’t these all admirable qualities in their own right?
Moreover, here in force, in their tens of thousands, he had to admit they made a stunning impact on the senses.
His vantage point was five clear bowshots from the edge of their camp, yet his nostrils were filled with the reek of copal incense and putrid human blood, the characteristic stink of the Mexica that clung about them like a half-articulated threat wherever they gathered in large numbers.
Also rising off them was a tremendous cacophony of sound – drums, flutes and songs, the buzz of fifty thousand conversations, vendors shouting their wares in four makeshift markets that had sprung up across the plain like strange exotic growths.
With thousands of porters, water-carriers and personal slaves, and a ragged host of camp followers including butchers and tailors, astrologers and doctors, cooks and odd-job men, vendors of all manner of foodstuffs and services, and a parallel army of gaudily dressed pleasure girls, Shikotenka calculated the total numbers in the Mexica
camp as somewhere close to sixty thousand. Despite the rigid military lines where the regiments were setting out their tents, the overall impression on the eye was therefore as much that of a country carnival as of a great army pausing on its march. Nor did the masses of soldiers detract from this impression of gaiety, for the Mexica rewarded success in battle with uniforms of feathers and gold and richly dyed fabrics that sparkled and glimmered in the sun, merging into waves and spirals of startling greens, yellows, blues, reds and deep purples, interspersed with expanses of dazzling white.
More than any other factor, what determined a man’s worth amongst the Mexica was the number of captives of high quality taken alive in the heat of battle and sacrificed to their ferocious war god Huitzilopochtli, an entity of surpassing depravity and ugliness, whose name, somewhat incongruously, meant ‘Hummingbird’.
All those of whatever age who had not yet taken a captive were considered novices. They signified their lack of achievement by wearing nothing more than a white loincloth and a plain white sleeveless jacket of padded cotton armour. There were a great many novices in this army, Shikotenka noted with interest, far more than normal in a force of such size.
More experienced fighters also used the armour but it was concealed beneath uniforms appropriate to their status.
Those who had taken two prisoners wore a tall conical headdress and a matching bodysuit. The shimmering colours of both cap and suit – most often crimson or yellow, but sometimes sky blue or deep green – came from thousands of tiny feathers painstakingly stitched to the underlying cotton garments. Men entitled to wear this uniform were usually the largest block in any Mexica army, but in three of the four regiments here today they were outnumbered by novices.
Next came warriors who had taken three captives. Shikotenka spotted companies of them distributed across the whole mass of the army, recognisable by their long armour and butterfly-shaped back ornaments made of purple and green feathers stitched to a wicker frame.
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