by Vonna Harper
“Because even before Cortes came, I and the others who believed as I did no longer lived in the cities. Our home was in the mountains.”
“Oh. But if you were a warrior, why weren’t you—”
“The Spanish were brutal men, but they weren’t the only ones. What the Aztec were doing, some of their beliefs—my lord knew they were wrong.”
“And you followed your lord?”
He nodded. “Because my thinking was the same, even if it went against what the priests and gods demanded.”
As fascinating as what he’d just told her was, she couldn’t absorb it all right now. “Are you saying you were spared because you were able to hide from Cortes’ men?”
Eyes now open and blazing, he shook his head. “We didn’t hide. There were no cowards among us. But by the time we knew what was happening, it was too late.”
Before she could reply, not that she knew what she was going to say, the sound of an approaching vehicle spun her around. Spotting one of the tour buses, she scanned the ground for her top. Only once she’d found it did she look at Nacon—or rather at the spot where he’d been.
Chapter Eight
“I wish you were here,” Dana told her mother over the phone that evening. “This is the most incredible setting. Right now I’m sitting outside my cabin with a glass of wine watching the sun set. I know you’d love it.”
“It sounds incredible. Are you wrapping things up? You said you thought the assignment wouldn’t take more than a few days.”
“Well, plans have changed.” The setting sun was turning the sky a brilliant mix of oranges and reds, perfect for letting one’s imagination run loose, which was what hers was doing at the moment. It wouldn’t take much to imagine Nacon striding toward her. Although it might be fun to picture him carrying a frosty pitcher of margaritas, he wasn’t the kind of man to wait on anyone.
After shaking her head, she filled her mother in on her plans to spread the word about the endangered jaguar population. “I bet you didn’t know I was going to turn into an environmentalist, did you?” she finished.
“Jaguars? Why them?”
Pulled out of her wine-lethargy by her mother’s strained tone, Dana straightened. “They’re beautiful, incredible creatures. There’s only one here, but he has a mystique about him, a nobility. It would be a tragedy if they became extinct.”
“Yes it would, but your reasons go deeper than that.”
That was her mother, all right. No matter how much she matured, her mother had always been able to tap into what was going on beneath the surface. Part of that was the simple mother-daughter connection of course, but for most of her childhood, only her mother had been there to raise her. The two of them had been a family, a small, tight and loving unit.
“I guess they are,” she replied. “Maybe it’s my tattoo.”
An audible sigh. “Maybe. Oh, don’t mind me. I guess I’m feeling a little empty nesty these days. My girl is all grown up and has her own career—an unconventional career.”
That’s not all you’re thinking about. “You’d rather I spend my days sitting behind a desk?”
“Like that’s ever going to happen. Darn it, kid, I followed the safe and sane track by working for a large corporation while you—”
“You had me to think of. It would be different if I had children. I’d be less likely to chance running my own business.”
“Would you?”
They’d been down this road enough times that Dana knew where the conversation was heading. For as long as she could remember, she’d needed to color outside the lines. Impatient with public schooling, she’d groused until her mother had enrolled her in alternative classes, but even then she’d preferred independent study. College had ended halfway through the first term because she’d rather have had root canals than sit and listen to someone tell her how to think or what to believe. Even her earliest job had taken her far from baby-sitting when she’d browbeaten a river guide neighbor into hiring her as his assistant. From there she’d parlayed her wilderness experience into such varied gigs as camp counselor, trails maintenance, even mushroom hunting. When everything else was stripped away, her job and life choices boiled down to two things—the outdoors and restlessness.
“I can’t answer that, Mom,” she said. “So far it hasn’t been a decision I've had to make.”
“What if you get married? Do you think your husband would be satisfied seeing you only occasionally?”
“Could be, especially if I drive him crazy from being underfoot and bouncing off the walls. Besides, this is hypothetical since the last time I looked there wasn’t a single, solitary man in my life.” Before yesterday.
Other mothers would be encouraging their daughter to take a good look around and find a man, maybe any man, but Dana had said what she had because she trusted her mother not to play that card. “Speaking of men in one’s life,” her mother said, “Jim turned down that promotion.”
“He did?” Jim was her stepfather, a tall, lean intelligent soul with a number of absent-minded professor tendencies. “I thought it came with a hefty raise.”
“It did. It also meant more responsibility than he wanted to take on. We agreed that being able to walk away from a job at the end of the day’s a lot more important than paying more taxes.”
“Good for him. And good for you to back his decision which I know you did. Mom?”
“What?”
“Have you heard from Dad lately?”
Her mother didn’t immediately reply, which gave her the answer she needed. Her parents might not have been able to make a go of their marriage, but they still loved each other. And although she’d never said so, Dana knew her mother loved her father more than she ever had or could Jim. “No,” her mother said at length. “Have you?”
“No. I’ve been mind-messaging him, and I think I’m getting through.”
“I hope so.”
They talked a few more minutes then hung up after professing their love for each other. Although Dana wanted to refill her wine glass and maybe wallow in her aloneness as the world around her grew dark, she simply sat and stared without seeing. Her thoughts flitted between Nacon and her father. On the outside the two men had nothing in common, not that she knew much about Nacon. The same might be said about her father who had walked away from his only marriage when his only offspring was barely two years old. Her father had always stayed in touch with her, and when he came to see her, the rest of the world faded into the background. Even when they were apart, they connected on a level that didn’t require words.
As darkness increased, the world in which she currently made her home faded away, and she slipped into the past. She’d been twelve or thirteen at the time and heartbroken because the boy she absolutely knew she was destined to spend the rest of her life with had chosen his bicycle over her. This had been before Jim and her mother met, which meant that when her father visited he stayed at their house, in his ex-wife’s bed.
If she recalled correctly, her mother had been at work when she’d run, sobbing of course, into the house and thrown herself on her bed. Her father had materialized more than entered her room, sat on the side of the bed, and rubbed her back until she sat up. Instead of throwing words like puppy love and you’ll get over it at her, he’d gently encouraged her to hold her emotions up to the sunlight. By the time she was done, heartbreak had been replaced by laughter. After all, what good was a boy who didn’t know the difference between a tire patch and an engagement ring?
She needed a mature man, she’d informed her father, someone like him who understood the meaning of the word love. When he’d asked how she was sure he comprehended the word, she’d told him she knew he adored her mother and that his emotion was returned with matching ferocity.
“I want what the two of you have,” she’d said. “True bonding.”
“We have love, honey,” he’d replied. “But I can’t give your mom, and you, what you need and deserve: me, consistently.”
“We take what we can get, you know that.”
“It isn’t enough. Your mother deserves better, and if you weren’t the most important thing in my life, I’d walk away.”
“Why?”
“To leave room for a real father, or rather stepfather to enter your world. Someone who’s always there, someone reliable, someone who isn’t so damn restless.”
The conversation had gone on for a long time with her father boldly facing his parental shortcomings and her insisting that no one was perfect and she was happier with bits and pieces of him than a whole of any other father figure. In the end, they’d clung to each other, and when she’d finally straightened and looked into his eyes, she’d known she wasn’t the only one who’d been crying.
“I’m sorry our Internet speed’s so slow,” Rose said the next day as Dana sat in front of the office computer. “We keep being promised DSL, but the boondocks are always going to be on the back burner. Hopefully you’ll find what you’re looking for before you get too frustrated.”
“If I don’t, I’ll go to the library. I just wanted to give myself as much of a cram course about the Aztecs as I can from here.”
“Aztecs? You’re interested in them because of our resident jaguar?”
Unwilling to lie, Dana settled for a non-committal shrug. Because Rose’s morning was full, as soon as she was sure Dana could get on-line, the older woman left the office. Now alone with her impatient fingers and memories of a hot and bothered dream that had made sleep impossible, Dana finally answered Rose’s question. The jaguar’s name had very little to do with her curiosity.
“I’m not going to try to find answers as to why you’re here. They certainly aren’t on the Internet,” she muttered to the non-existent Nacon. “For all I know, you’re leading me a line of bull and you’re in your early thirties and not who the hell knows how many hundreds of years old. If that’s true, you’re one hell of an actor; I have to give you credit for that.” And for being the best sex partner I’ve ever had, hands down.
Rose had been right: the slow online speed was frustrating. However, eventually she found a site that didn’t bog her down with graphics while providing a fairly comprehensive history course on the culture that had dominated the three-thousand-square-mile basin known as the Valley of Mexico for nearly a hundred years. Because the details of how easily and completely Cortes and his six-hundred soldiers had decimated the Aztecs made her sick, she focused on their achievements. Although Nacon had told her he’d been a warrior, she imagined him helping construct the grand buildings or creating the Calendar Stone which was an invaluable road map of the Aztecs’ destiny.
Eventually, she forced aside her revulsion and delved into the civilization’s dark side. The Aztecs were terrified of their gods, particularly Huitzilopochtli who had been their war god. In an effort to appease him and the others, they performed daily human sacrifices, most of them at the top of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. Captives, enemy warriors, slaves, and members of nearby tribes all supplied the insatiable bloodletting the Aztec believed Huitzilopochtli demanded. Priests and those belonging to the royal family were in charge of the brutal practice, and if the rank and file Aztecs objected, history didn’t record that. The most desirable sacrifices came from the ranks of enemy warriors whose hearts were believed to be particularly strong and courageous.
Nacon had been a warrior. Surely he’d fought his people’s enemies, captured some of the men he’d faced in battle. Much as she hated the image, she couldn’t hide from a simple fact. Nacon had forced his vanquished but still brave foes up the stairs of the Great Temple so priests could cut out their living hearts.
Nacon, the man she’d had wild and savage sex with, was the most horrific kind of savage she could imagine!
Closing out of the Internet, she leaned back in her chair and pressed her hands over her eyes. She sat there for a long time, at first not thinking, but then thinking too much, imagining.
In her mind, she stood at the foot of the Great Temple staring at the dried blood stains coating the stairs. Nacon was beside her with his rough hands on her bare arms. She tried to shake him off only to discover that her hands had been tied behind her. Not just her arms were naked, her whole body was.
This was why Nacon had seduced her, so he could sacrifice her?
Although reason insisted she was wrong, that they were in the present day and not trapped in that brutal past, she knew better than to try to break free of the image because it would only return. Instead, pulling courage around her, she placed herself next to Nacon and felt rough stone beneath her feet.
He didn’t speak to her, and if he glanced her way, she didn’t catch the quick movement. His head was up, his gaze locked on the top of the temple where several men in elaborate flowing gowns decorated with bird feathers and precious stones and wearing massive headgear waited. They were obviously the priests, and from the way Nacon held himself, he was in awe of those who understood and communicated with the gods in ways he could only imagine and envy. He’d brought her, his captive, to the servants of the gods so they would be pleased with him. She was nothing to him beyond the bleeding and beating heart the gods demanded. Even before her heart stopped beating, Nacon would be at peace because he’d done what he believed was right.
She couldn’t blame him. How could she when he’d never been taught anything different? Was it his fault that she, hungry for sex, had all but thrown herself at him?
What was she thinking! It wasn’t the 1500s when Cortes and his men had arrived. The brutal and non-existent god Huitzilopochtli no longer ruled. She wasn’t going to be sacrificed, she wasn’t!
And Nacon had said he and others had rebelled against the cruel practice.
But could he be believed? After all, the gods had been all-powerful.
Eyes still closed, she surged to her feet, then held onto the desk until her head stopped spinning.
“Leave me alone, Nacon! Just leave me the hell alone.”
“Don’t move.”
“What are you doing here? Damn it, I told you to leave me alone.”
“What you said and what we need aren’t the same. I listen to need.”
Even as she tried to cast off the dream, Dana acknowledged that Nacon made perfect sense. She’d spent the day waiting for Aztec to make an appearance, and although she’d settled for a few shots of him half hidden in foliage, experience told her the pictures had a surreal quality that would reinforce what she intended to write about the big cat’s tenuous hold on the earth. When it was too dark for any more pictures, she’d gone into her cabin and forced herself to work on the text. If she’d been smart, she would have tried to hook up with Rose at the bar she’d talked about, washed her hair or clothes or gone grocery shopping, anything except immerse herself in the creature that reminded her so much of Nacon.
At least she hadn’t given into the clawing hunger demanding she go outside and beg Nacon to come to her. Damn it, that glass of wine should have put her to sleep, not forced herself to hover between oblivion and erotic images.
Images. Voices. Nacon’s wisdom and knowledge of her body slipping over her.
“Take off your nightgown. I want to watch you strip.”
“Where are you? I can’t see you.”
“Do as I say. Then I’ll reveal myself.”
Knowing she had no defenses against his bribe, she pulled off her covers and stood. A whisper of moonlight slipped through the window to faintly illuminate the small bedroom with its sagging double bed. Turning toward the window, she grabbed the man’s shirt she’d chosen for a nightgown, and slowly, sensually, lifted the garment. With each inch, she became more and more bitch and less a modern woman. Her nipples were already hard in anticipation of feeling air and nothing else on them, her labia sensitive, her pussy swelling.
Ready for fucking.
“There,” she whispered as she pulled the soft cotton over her head. Static electricity made her hair lift, and she laughed, thinking of what she must
look like. Then something, maybe more of the electricity, found her breasts, and she forgot her unruly hair. She dropped the shirt onto the bed so she could press her hands over her hard and aching breasts.
“I did that to you, didn’t I?”
“And maybe I did it to myself. Maybe you don’t know this, but women don’t always need a man to get off. We’re perfectly capable of entertaining ourselves.”
“But not tonight. Tonight I’m responsible.”
Were those still her hands, or had he found a way to replace them with his? It didn’t matter because she could control the amount of pressure on her mounds. Hard followed by light, rough circular movement and when she couldn’t handle that any more, tender. “You—you said you’d reveal yourself once I was naked.”
There. In the room’s far corner where little but night reached, a magnificent form. It didn’t move, but she wasn’t ready for more than that. “Do you have any clothes? I’ve never seen you anything except naked.”
“I have clothes—for when I need them.”
Logical, ah, yes, logical. “I learned some things today,” she told him with her fingers tiptoeing around her nub. “Some pretty horrible things about the Aztec.”
“Tonight’s not about that.”
“Then what is it about?”
A shift, one of those disjointed scene changes that takes place in dreams. When things stopped swirling, she was on her back on the bed, her arms above her head and Nacon sitting beside her with his hand on her mons.
