Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Uncle, do you think this is somehow related to the matter of the huetlacoatl?”

  “It was not sacrificed, you said. Besides the Emperor’s Shadow has shown no interest in that matter.” He shifted his position on his great chair and sucked the gourd dry noisily. “No, I think for now we can consider such a connection unlikely.

  “Meanwhile, my boy, I have another job for you. One that might shed some light on—the other matter.”

  I leaned against the low stone railing with the mid-afternoon sun behind me and looked down upon the former lords of creation.

  Not far away, a howler monkey bellowed and a jaguar cried.

  Long ago, the Hero Twins, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, slew the water monster Cipactli. They made the world out of its mangled carcass, and human creation began. Before that, these, or ones like them, had ruled the Earth.

  For their evil, lust and impiety, the Gods had sent fire from the sky, and their rule had ended. Only on the southern continent, hidden behind a veil of storms, did they remain as a warning to men of the power and majesty of the Gods.

  Or so the story went. Personally, I thought that if the Gods allowed man to continue, they owed the huetlacoatls an apology.

  There were four of them in the pit below me, picking at the mass of greenery in the mangers on the walls. When one of them stretched erect, its head came to within a few feet of the parapet. And these were not the biggest of the huetlacoatls, only two-legged browsers that walked with their bodies nearly horizontal and their tails straight out behind them. One of them lifted its head, with leaves dripping from its jaws, and cocked an incurious eye at me. For an instant, I wondered what the old lords of creation thought of the new. Then it dropped its gaze and went back to the manger.

  That was about the closest I’d come to an insight in the course of a long, tedious afternoon at the Imperial Menagerie. Uncle Tlaloc wanted more information, and I’d hoped for something that would give me an idea, anything, about the murder of the huetlacoatl from studying the other creatures of the Viru.

  I’d seen big huetlacoatls and bigger ones. Ones that were big and ferocious enough to be demigods, and ones that were ponderous and stupid. Apparently the southern continent was overrun with the things in all sorts of nightmare shapes. But nothing I saw gave me insight.

  It was a rare sunny day, and the menagerie was thronged with nobility and their servants. There was even a fair sprinkling of commoners, admitted by “special dispensation“—actually a small bribe to the keepers. The commoners were wearing their feast day best and the nobles the bright mantles appropriate to their stations. The people were far more colourful than the huetlacoatls, and a lot more interesting than tanks of water monsters, and cages of woolly beasts of the distant north.

  I forced my attention back to the huetlacoatls below me, but as I turned something flew past my shoulder into the huetlacoatl pit. They shifted and honked nervously. Then a hand of bananas landed close to the first object, a red-and-green mango. I turned to see four or five other people crowding up against the rail, male and female and most dressed in the plain tunics of commoners. They were chanting prayers and throwing fruit into the pit like worshippers at a shrine. Some of them were rocking back and forth with their eyes closed, as if in ecstasy.

  Two of the menagerie attendants came running up, shouting at the congregation and waving their staffs of office. They laid into the little group of worshippers with the heavy mahogany sticks, sending them scattering and screaming. One guard struck a young woman across the kidneys. The woman stumbled towards me, and the attendant caught her a glancing blow on the side of the head. The woman tried to run, but the guard was almost on top of her, striking again and again with his stick.

  I waited until she staggered by me and casually shifted my stance. The guard tripped over my foot and went sprawling face-first into the dirt.

  While he was down, I took the young woman’s arm and motioned towards the alley between the pens with my eyes. In spite of the blood running down her cheek she smiled and darted off. I turned my attention to helping the attendant to his feet. By the time he shook off my ministrations, the girl and the others had vanished.

  Meanwhile, other attendants had entered the pit and were busy gathering up the offerings. They scurried among the huetlacoatls’ huge clawed feet, ducking beneath the great tails to grab the smashed remnants of fruit. The huetlacoatls were still nervous and any second I expected to see an attendant smashed as flat as that first mango.

  There was a low whistle over my right shoulder. All four of the beasts below me jerked upright as if on a string. Their heads swivelled towards me and they pushed closer to the wall. Instinctively I took a step back and groped under my cloak for my sword.

  “It’s all right,” someone said. I turned and there was an old man. He was wearing a dirty cloak with the three lines of feathers of the middle nobility and leaning on a heavy, carved stick. “They’re just looking for me. Aren’t you, my pretties?” At the sound of his voice all the huetlacoatls began to whistle and hiss.

  He stumped to the parapet and looked down. The animals pressed against the wall and craned their necks even higher. He leaned out at a dangerous angle and reached down with his stick to scratch the tallest ones on their muzzles. “How are we today?” he crooned. “All healthy and happy?” The smaller ones were making little leaps to try to bring their muzzles within range of his cane.

  “Magnificent, aren’t they?” he asked without taking his eyes from them. “I’m their mother, you know.” He glanced sideways to see if the statement had the desired effect.

  “It must have been a difficult labour, Uncle.”

  He cackled at the thought. All the while the cane tip kept caressing the monsters in the pit.

  “I raised them from eggs,” he said as he straightened up to the audible disappointment of his “children”. “I was the first thing they saw when they hatched and I stayed with them night and day when they were in the nest, fed them chewed-up leaves. When they were older they followed me everywhere. Oh yes, they are my children.”

  “You know them well? The huetlacoatls, I mean.”

  His face cracked into an improbable smile. “As well as anyone. I am Foureagle, the keeper of the Emperor’s animals.”

  “What can you tell me about the huetlacoatls?”

  “More than you want to know, young one. Or would believe if I told you.”

  “Would you share your wisdom with me—” I made a quick mental judgment “--over a bowl of pulque?”

  Again the smile. “Lead on, young sir.”

  A grog seller had his cart, brightly painted with many portraits of Lady Mayahuel, the inventor of the sacred drink, just outside the gates of the menagerie. I purchased a couple of gourds, received a perfunctory blessing, and Foureagle and I settled in the shade with our backs to the wall. The old man took a long, deep pull, wiped his mouth and sighed lustily.

  “Those damn fools,” he said, jerking his head to indicate where the fruit-throwers had been. “They don’t understand that those beasts can’t digest fruit. It makes them sick.”

  “Is that why they throw it?”

  He snorted. “They think they are worshipping them, making offerings to the avatars of their gods. What they’re really doing is killing the poor things—if we don’t stop them.” He took another swig from his gourd. “All this whoring after new gods, young sir. No good can come of it.”

  I nodded gravely, as if the old man had said something profound. “But of the huetlacoatls themselves, what can you tell me of them?”

  “Ah,” he sighed and took another pull. “They thrive only down on Viru, you know,” he said by way of a beginning. “Only there. They do not do well here, just as man does not prosper there.”

  “The ones here—” I gestured to the menagerie behind us “--seem to do well enough.”

  “Only because we care for them,” the old man said. “It took generations for us to learn how to do so. There are many kinds, a
nd each has subtly different needs. That pen the duckbills are in, for example: it would not do for the long necks, nor the spike-tails. And if you tried to keep the big meat-eaters in there, they’d be out and among the visitors in less than a day-cycle.” Another pull on the gourd. “Those meat-eaters can jump.”

  “Do they share a common language?”

  Again the cackle. “The ones here? They are mere beasts. The huetlacoatl version of deer and jaguar. Only the talking huetlacoatls are intelligent in the way of man.”

  Shit! An afternoon wasted. I had never thought of the huetlacoatls as intelligent in the sense that men are intelligent, but I assumed they were more than beasts.

  “They were unknown to us until we reached the southern lands,” said Foureagle. “They are big, powerful and strange, so men try to worship them.”

  “Do they ever sacrifice them?”

  The old man snorted. “Here? To what end? Their blood will not aid our corn, nor can their deaths help keep the balance with our Gods. They are of an older creation, a different order of magic, if you believe in such things.”

  “So you have never heard of one being sacrificed?”

  “On this continent? Never.”

  “I have heard it said that they carry powerful medicine within them. Valuable medicine.”

  The old man looked at me sharply. “Who told you such nonsense? Inside a huetlacoatl is nothing but bone, guts and muscle, just like a deer or a man. I should know. I have seen the inside of enough of all of them.”

  “Nothing worth cutting one open for, then?”

  Again the sharp look. “I did not say that. There is knowledge to be gained.”

  A kind of divination? “Knowledge of the future?”

  “Shit, no! Knowledge of the huetlacoatls. How they work. And how they are related to us.”

  “We are relatives?”

  “Not close. They are closer to lizards and snakes, and closer yet to crocodiles and birds. But yes, we are related as all animals are related.” He sucked his gourd dry and looked at me expectantly.

  “Allow me to provide you with another,” I said, rising to return to the vendor’s cart for fresh gourds of the milky brew.

  While the vendor refilled the gourds, I pondered what Foureagle had told me. By the time I returned I had my new line of questions framed and ready.

  “It is said,” I began when the old man raised his nose from the gourd again, “that a priest can tell the future from the entrails of a deer.” Or a man. “Could a priest not do the same from the entrails of one of these?”

  “It is said that in England men are born with prehensile toes to better grip the earth so that they may not fall off it,” he retorted. “Even those who believe such things know that like calls to like. Better to read the entrails of a chicken, unless you wish to know what portends on the southern continent.”

  “And yet… “

  “And yet you seek after phantoms,” the old man said, pouring the last of his pulque on the ground and levering himself erect. “You treat these things as if they were supernatural, not of this world. They are not, I can assure you. They are of the same world and the same flesh as we are. Older, it is true. Far older, but there is nothing miraculous to be had from them. Now I thank you for your generosity, young sir, but if you will excuse me I will seek a quiet place to piss.”

  I had just debarked from a water taxi and gone perhaps two streets back towards the Hummingbird’s Palace when I realized I was being followed. A single man, far enough back not to be obvious and no apparent threat. I loosened my sword in its scabbard under the cover of adjusting my cloak and continued on without breaking stride.

  It could be I was simply being shadowed for some reason, I told myself. After all, no one would risk Uncle Tlaloc’s wrath by attacking me while I was about his business. Yeah, right.

  I made two blocks more when there was a low whistle from behind me and three more men glided out of the darkness. All were stubby, thickset, and muffled in coarse black cloaks. Grey turbans were tied about their heads and adjusted to hide their faces and painted to look like death-heads.

  I turned to face the one to my left, fumbling under my cloak as if for my sword. The man hung back and our eyes locked. I sensed rather than heard his companions rushing me.

  At just the proper moment I thrust backwards through my cloak and into the body of the man behind. Then I sidestepped, slashed at the man on my right. That made him jump back and left me free to concentrate on the one to my left for just a split second. A quick upward slash and I felt my blade bite flesh and scrape along bone. He grasped his arm and reeled away while I turned to take on the man on my right as he closed in, sword held hilt low for a finishing thrust.

  With a single motion, I swept my cloak off and tossed it at his head, sidestepping towards him as I moved. He dodged away from the cloak, but he was still off balance when I stepped in and split his skull.

  I turned to put my back to the wall and looked around. The one with the arm wound was pattering off down the street. The one with the split skull was dead and the third man would soon join him. Now he was rolling on the ground and clutching his belly. My follower, the one who had whistled, had disappeared.

  I was breathing hard, and my hands were shaking so badly I could hardly resheathe my sword. Damn! And that was my second-best cloak. The blood had soaked into the featherwork and there was no way to get it clean. I left it behind as a calling card and, with a final look up and down the streets, hurried off to the Hummingbird’s Palace. Uncle Tlaloc doesn’t like it when a messenger is late, and it takes more than an attack by three men to deflect his displeasure.

  After delivering my report to Uncle Tlaloc, I sat in the bar at the Hummingbird’s Palace, sipping snow wine and keeping my back to the wall while I tried to figure out my next move.

  Uncle Tlaloc had been much amused and mildly interested by my adventure with the Silver Skulls. I was much less amused and a lot more interested. Obviously, someone wanted me dead even more than usual. Badly enough to hire one of English Town’s strong-arm gangs to try to take me out. But who? Who had I seriously annoyed recently? Threeflower? Unlikely. Certainly this wasn’t connected to my errand for Uncle Tlaloc.

  And anyway I couldn’t imagine anyone in English Town setting the Silver Skulls on me. They were the best-known of the muscle gangs, but the local opinion was they were much better at making threats and breaking knees than killing people. Which implied that my enemy was someone with more money than knowledge. Which brought me back to Lady Threeflower, but that was ridiculous.

  The Emperor’s Shadow? Even more ridiculous. If they wanted me dead, I’d be dead. It would be an accident, a fair duel, the work of mysterious unknowns, or perhaps at the hands of the Death Master, but it would not be done by a bunch like the Silver Skulls. A warning from the Emperor’s Shadow then? No, that was too paranoid even for English Town.

  The one thing I was sure of was that I didn’t like all this attention. Not only would I have to watch my back with more than usual care, but I’d probably have to pay wergild to the Silver Skulls for the men I had killed. And I’d have to replace my feathered cloak.

  I sipped my wine and thought about my tailor for a while. Certainly a more pleasant subject than the Emperor’s Shadow, or the Silver Skulls.

  I was wandering the streets through a dark, starless night. Disease spirits floated through the air, brushing by me as they passed.

  A dark alley filled with rapid, delicate noise. A blue hummingbird was fighting with a black butterfly. The noise of battle grew louder and louder. I ran away.

  Then a rubber ball came bouncing towards me. I was about to hit it with my hip, the way I would try to play the sacred ball game as a boy. The ball suddenly stopped bouncing.

  It wasn’t a ball any more. It was Smoke’s skinless head.

  “Who are you disappointing this time, Lucky?” it asked.

  And a voice said, “Lucky, over here!” I knew that voice. All too well.
<
br />   I found myself in the neighbourhood where I grew up, where I am forbidden ever to return.

  Turning to look, I saw Twoocelot. She was standing in the doorway of a rotting Frog-style hut. She wore a bride’s dress, but her lips were painted black like a prostitute’s.

  “Lucky,where have you been all these years?” she asked. Her eyes were so much friendlier than her older sister’s.

  I tried hard to politely look away. “You know. I know. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Am I so horrible? Do you prefer my sister Threeflower?”

  “No.”

  She stepped close to me. There was something wrong with her face. Her skin hung slack, like a limp mask.

  “Why do you look at me like that? Am I so ugly?” She grabbed a handful of the skin hanging from her face, pulled and tore it away. Underneath was her sister, Threeflower.

  “You miss the old days, and your old life, don’t you?” she sneered. “You wish that you could have been a gentleman, instead of a thug!”

  “I am what the Gods made me to be.” I turned to go.

  “Lucky,” her soft voice called. Something about it stopped me in my tracks. I thought my heart was going to explode. Against my will, I looked over my shoulder at Threeflower.

  “Are you really? Do the Gods make us, or do we make ourselves?” Her skin rippled, became blotchy and bloated. Flesh-eating worms emerged like long pimples and ate away her face; except for her teeth, which grew long and rearranged themselves until she had the face of a huetlacoatl.

  The next day started in the same way as the day before—which is to say late in the afternoon in a fog of leftover alcohol. No visit from Threeflower, of course. I waited until my reflexes were back together, even if my head wasn’t, before I ventured out. Between the padded cotton tunic and the light mail shirt over it, a regular tunic over that, and a rain cloak on top of it all, I was seriously overdressed for the wet season, but I still felt better for it.