The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Very,” she snapped, and the color drained from her cheeks as she caught the implication. “I suppose you know brothel keepers as well,” she said with cold fury.

  “Many of them,” I said and smiled at her discomfiture. “But none of the ones I know would be foolish enough to kidnap a high-born maid off the streets in broad daylight.” Not unless they were very well paid, I thought, and well enough protected not to fear Uncle Tlaloc and his peers. But word of something that big should have gotten around. This was beginning to sound interesting.

  “Did she have lovers?”

  “She was untouched,” Threeflower said. “The maid confirmed that before she died.”

  “A flirtation, then?”

  “I would have known even that.”

  “So.” I was silent for a long time.

  “I will pay well for Fourflower’s safe return,” Threeflower said.

  “Undoubtedly, Lady. But I will be honest with you. I doubt very much the child is still alive.”

  “Then I will pay for her killers.”

  If the girl had died in a bungled kidnapping, the head of the ring would gladly give the skins of her killers as a peace offering and pay wergild besides.

  “I will see what I can discover.”

  She nodded, reached beneath her mantle and tossed something at me. I dodged instinctively, and the deerskin pouch hit the floor with the metallic clink.

  “That will do for a start, I think.”

  I kicked the pouch back to the hem of her skirt. “I am not doing this for money,” I told her.

  She smiled for the first time. “You shall have nothing else of me. My husband cannot restore you and I would not ask it of him even if he could.”

  “You misread me,” I said coldly.

  “I read you well enough to know that in an age when things were done properly you would have been killed instead of merely banished.”

  “And in an age when things were done properly you would be whipped naked from one temple plaza to the next for visiting a man not a relative, unescorted, and at night.” I looked at her speculatively. “That could still happen, you know.”

  She snorted, threw her mantle over her head and stalked out. Uo must have met her at the door because I did not hear it slam as she left. I was already reaching for the tequila.

  It was late the next afternoon when I awoke with a pounding head, a foul taste in my mouth, and a sourness in the pit of my stomach that was more than physical. Twice in two days I had had to deal with ghosts from my former life and that was two times too many.

  I dressed in a clean tunic and cloak, bolted down a cold tamale that settled in my stomach like a lump of basalt, and hurried out. It was not long until the market gates would close, and there was someone I wanted to see, as much for my own peace of mind as anything else.

  The streets about the Fireflower Market were thronged with porters, slaves, housewives, and their maids. Here and there were caged parrots with their mouths open, hanging their wormlike tongues as if they were dying of thirst. A barefoot Frog girl, barely old enough to be married, blocked my way to the entrance. She was holding a baby who had wooden blocks tied to his skull to make it slope like the forehead of a reptile, but she broke off her plea as we were pressed back against the wall to make way for a green-plumed noble and his retinue.

  I followed in his convenient wake, being forced to pause only twice, as he stopped to watch the tiny daughter of a featherworker delicately plucking the feathers off of a skewered hummingbird with thin bone tweezers; and then as he paused by the tattooist, who was beating the line that would make a young man’s pretty face look as if it were covered with scales. Around us, the busy market was beginning to clear out. A few of the vendors had already shut their stalls, and here and there sweepers were at work. I dove into the maze of twisty lanes between the stalls, checked my bearings once, and pulled up before a narrow doorway hidden by a reed mat which still bore the stained and weary outline of a jaguar.

  “Who comes?” A voice croaked as I thrust aside the matting and stepped through the door into the darkness.

  “A pilgrim seeking wisdom from Mother Jaguar,” I answered. There was a shifting sound behind me, as if someone had just relaxed, and perhaps lowered a weapon.

  “Enter then and be welcome,” the voice called, stronger this time. I stepped through the second doorway, thrust aside a cotton curtain and came face to face with Mother Jaguar.

  She was kneeling at a low clay altar table, casting and recasting knucklebones too small for a deer or a pig. “Sit, my son,” she said in a voice that was stronger and younger than the one which had greeted me at the door. “What do you seek?”

  She didn’t look up until I tossed three silver coins onto the table next to the knucklebones. She was ancient, but her eyes were black and sharp as obsidian points in her wrinkled, tattooed face.

  “There is a maid named Fourflower, a high-born maid,” I began. “It is said she was stolen from the marketplace on the day of the Ocelot, last. Her family seeks her and would be grateful for any aid.”

  Mother Jaguar nodded. “I have heard this story, but I know nothing of such a maid or such a stealing. Nor do any of my ones in the world of spirits know of such a thing.”

  “A kidnapping for private reasons then? Perhaps lust?”

  Mother Jaguar cast the bones again and shook her head. “I and my spirits know nothing,” she repeated.

  I nodded. If you paid Mother Jaguar for information, and if she took your money, then she would tell you the truth. Which meant that neither Mother nor any of her kind knew anything about what had happened to Fourflower.

  “Thank you for your wisdom,” I said and rose to go.

  “Your money,” Mother Jaguar said.

  I tossed a fourth coin on the table. “It is yours. I asked, and you gave of your wisdom. It is not a fault that the answer was other than I hoped.” I turned to pass through the curtain.

  “Wait,” Mother Jaguar said. I turned and she cast the bones, once, twice, and again, while I waited.

  “Your maid is not the only one so taken,” Mother Jaguar said at last. “There have been several others, all of impeccable lineage, but perhaps not favored by fortune.”

  “All maids?”

  “Some maids, some boys, a few unmarried men and women, perhaps a hand count in all. All in the last two cycles of days.”

  “Who?”

  “No one knows. Nor why.” She turned again to her casting and the coins vanished from the altar as if by magic.

  Uncle Tlaloc was impassive when I told him what I had found out about the kidnapping that evening.

  It was still early and Uncle was drinking mate rather than alcohol. He took a last long pull on the gourd through his golden straw as I finished my report. “Diverting perhaps,” he rumbled, “but I fail to see why it should be of concern to us.”

  I frowned. “There are ransoms, Uncle.”

  He waved that away. “Assuming they are alive.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “The odds are strongly against it. Besides, I understand the Emperor’s Shadow has taken an interest in the matter.”

  I started to ask why, realized it was a stupid question and closed my mouth. Kidnapped humans could be sacrificed, especially ones of little note but of excellent lineage. And, of course, it was treason for anyone other than the Emperor or the Imperial Priests to conduct a human sacrifice, since it implied a relationship to the Gods which was the Emperor’s alone. Yes, the Emperor’s Shadow would investigate a thing like that. And the Emperor’s Shadow was very bad news indeed.

  “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 midafternoon 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 colorful 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 worshipers 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 worshipers with the heavy mahogany sticks, sending them scattering and screaming. One guard struck a young woman across the kidneys. The woman stumbled toward 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 toward 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 swiveled toward 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 labor, 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 worshiping 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, and each has subtly different needs. That pen the duckbills are in, for example: it would not do for the longnecks, 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?”