This was another world.
No, it was the world. Stuart just hadn’t had to experience it quite so intimately before. His entire life, he’d known wealth. It had insulated him from everything, like a wadding of cotton wool.
That was gone now, and he missed it.
Didn’t he?
What he did miss, suddenly, gut-wrenchingly, were his wife and son. Grief hit him with the force of a charging rhino, and he realised he’d not felt this way — so hopelessly hollow, so utterly bereft — since the day he first donned the armour of the Conquistador. Everything he’d done as the Conquistador, the manic stunts, the priest slayings, had helped prevent him from dwelling too hard on Sofia and Jake. His head had become perfectly clear, free from conflicting thoughts. He’d no longer felt the yearning, aching need to hug the son who wasn’t there any more. He’d no longer switchbacked between adoring and loathing the woman who had ripped the heart out of his existence.
The Conquistador had been a crutch, a way of coping with his bereavement. Without it, he was forced to face all the emotions he’d locked away and tried to deny were there. They flooded upwards, consuming him. Stuart sobbed on the creaking, thin-mattressed bed. In part, he was mourning the loss of his cushioned, moneyed lifestyle, but what he really was mourning was the loss of the two people who had made that lifestyle worthwhile, who had justified it for him.
Prosperity was nothing without family. Only now, when he was deprived of both, did that truly make sense.
The following morning came the news that there had been a spate of volcanic activity in Europe. It was on the tiny TV set jabbering away in a corner of the cafe where Stuart and the men of Xibalba ate their breakfast. Three major volcanoes had begun erupting yesterday — Vesuvius, Hekla and Etna — and two of them had since calmed down but the third, Etna, continued to spew out ash and lava, so much so that towns in the vicinity had been evacuated.
Naturally this led talking-head commentators to speculate on whether the Great Speaker was sending some kind of message. Rarely did a cluster of eruptions occur unless it was at the Great Speaker’s command, and if he had given the order for the fusion plant at each site to stoke the earthly fires, why? It wasn’t just to push a few million tons more of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and keep the planet nice and toasty. What point was he making?
The fact that one of the volcanoes was in Iceland suggested that the Faroe Islands fishing dispute was still an unresolved issue. Could it be that yet more sacrifices of Icelandic worthies would have to be made? The four diplomats had not sufficed?
European High Priests would have to consult with the Great Speaker to learn why he was angered and how he could be appeased.
In the meantime, Ah Balam Chel had his own interpretation of the matter.
“You,” he said, pointing across the table at Stuart. “It’s you. You got away. Slipped the noose. And that’s made him very unhappy.”
Stuart could see the logic in this. “They’re the three volcanoes closest to Britain,” he said, nodding, “and Reston Rhyolitic was in negotiations to take over the mining of an obsidian lode on Etna. That’d be why Etna’s the worst affected, the one still blowing its top. The Speaker’s telling me he knows all about me. This is a targeted fuck-you.”
“Which, I imagine, irks you.”
“I don’t know. It seems more petty than anything. An impotent gesture. Like flicking someone a V after they’ve left the room.”
They spoke openly; there was nobody else in the cafe apart from the proprietor, and he was, Chel had said earlier, “a good man,” meaning aligned with the Xibalba cause. He also knew how to lay on a hearty breakfast: quinoa porridge, fried eggs, sourdough toast, boiled corn, fresh guava juice, plenty of everything.
“So you don’t feel personally affronted?” Chel said.
“If you’re trying to turn this into a feud between me and him…” Stuart finished off the sentence with a shrug.
The Xibalba leader frowned, concerned. “Tell me you still wish to see the Speaker dead. Surely you do.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“That’s hardly the ringing declaration of intent I was hoping for. Need I remind you, Mr Reston, that without Xibalba you would right now be languishing in a cell at Scotland Yard? Were it not for us, the best you’d have to look forward to from this point on would be the final plunge of a priest’s knife into your chest, bringing to an end what would be days of torture.”
“All right. I get it. You saved me from a fate worse than death. You think you should get something in return.”
“Not just something. We want you. We want the Conquistador. We want all that he’s done, all that he embodies, all that he can do. We travelled a long way to meet you. We risked our necks for you. I think that deserves recognition.” Chel was aggrieved. All signs of his usual good nature were gone. He wore the scowl of a man who did not like to be denied what he felt was his due.
Stuart was aware that he was in a room with a dozen hardened paramilitaries who would do whatever their leader asked of them. He was also in a foreign land where someone with his looks and complexion stood out like a sore thumb. Vaguely at the back of his mind there was the notion that Chel might, if so inclined, sell him out to the Jaguars. Psst. Listen. I know where that English troublemaker, the Conquistador, is. I’ll take you to where you can find him. He didn’t know Chel well enough to know if he was the vindictive type. He felt, however, that he shouldn’t cross the Mayan, just in case.
“I’m not saying I’m not onside. Just saying we need to think about this. I need to think about this. There’s no point going off half-cocked. I have to have more intel. A clearer idea of what you have in mind.”
“Ah well,” said Chel, looking and sounding placated. “For that, you’ll just have to stick with us.”
By which Stuart understood him to mean, Your wagon is hitched to Xibalba. You’re one of us, whether you like it or not. One of the good-as-dead.
Chel had influence and supporters within the Mayapan area. To those in the know, he was a local hero. What he desired, he got. He put the word about that he was looking for transportation. In no time at all he was in possession of a canvas-topped truck, military surplus. He also received donations of diesel from Xibalba sympathisers, enough jerry-cans of it to travel several hundred miles.
It was a long, jolting journey out of the Yucatan Peninsula, through lush agricultural lowlands, round the rim of the Gulf of Anahuac, north through what had once been Olmec country, on towards the mountainous heart of the Land Between The Seas. They drove through dark and daylight, stopping only to top up the fuel tank, relieve themselves, and refill their bellies.
A day and a half later they were in rainforested high ground. The roads were twisting and treacherous here. The main highways had hairpin bends that teetered above sheer, plummeting drops with often not even a crash barrier to give the illusion of safety. The back roads were worse still, their poor asphalting and the leftover debris from mudslides adding to the general hazardousness, but Chel insisted on using them as much as possible. Less chance of running into a random Jaguar stop-and-search patrol. Less likelihood of someone spying a Caucasian among a group of Anahuac nationals and reporting this suspicious incongruity to the authorities.
Evening was falling as the truck pulled into a hill village perched at high altitude, just below the cloud line. Chel had cousins here, or cousins of cousins. He was vague on the true nature of the connection, perhaps not even sure himself. Distant relatives, at any rate, and they knew Xibalba’s goal and were broadly in favour. The guerrillas and Stuart were put up in the village longhouse, where bedrolls were laid out for them in rows.
“From here to Tenochtitlan, it’s not far,” Chel said that night, as the villagers prepared to roast a wild pig in honour of their guests. “Forty miles in a straight line. We are near the Empire’s beating heart. The Great Speaker doesn’t know it yet, but his days are numbered.”
“If he’s truly a god, the
n maybe he does know it,” Stuart said. “Divine omniscience and all that.”
“But you don’t believe he is.”
“Of course not. If he’s anything, he’s a man who dreams he’s a god, but more likely he’s a man who knows he’s just pretending. There’s a fiction to be maintained, and he maintains it. The entire Empire is predicated on a lie.”
“And if we can spear that lie and kill it, then the whole structure surrounding it will die too.” The light of the cooking fire danced in Chel’s eyes. The smoke carried delicious smells.
“I’d like to think so. But a ship without its captain will still float.”
“But it won’t sail anywhere, will it?” Chel gave an impatient shake of the head. “You are, if I may say, Mr Reston, proving to be a lot more circumspect than I thought you would be. The Conquistador never struck me as a doubter. His actions carried the weight of absolute conviction. What has happened to that man?”
“Maybe I need my armour,” came the sardonic reply. “Can’t function without it.”
“Ah well, I can help you there. Come with me.”
Chel led him across the village to a hut belonging to one of his relatives. He himself was lodged there. Some of the Xibalba luggage was stacked in a corner, and Chel unzipped a couple of large rucksacks and produced, bit by bit, Stuart’s Conquistador armour. The individual pieces were wrapped in items of clothing so that they wouldn’t clank against one another. The rapier was there, even the flechette gun.
“It’s the one you wore at the theatre,” he said. “The one we removed from you.”
“You’ve had it all along?” Stuart picked up the morion helmet and examined it by the light of the hut’s solitary battery-powered lantern. He turned it this way and that, as if seeing it for the first time in years. That was how unfamiliar it seemed, here in this remote rainforest village, thousands of miles from home. Utterly out of context, and oddly nostalgic.
“I told you I’d get the armour back to you. Now I have. Does it change your mind at all? Persuade you in any way?”
Funnily enough, being reunited with his Conquistador outfit did restore some of Stuart’s sense of mission. He was reminded how invincible he felt while wearing it, how shot through with purpose. It was like some bizarre form of addiction. He was nothing — adrift, rudderless, at the mercy of the elements — without this steel carapace around him and these weapons in his hands. He was an empty shell, and the armour, a shell around shell, somehow made him whole.
“I’ll need to see,” he said slowly. “Tenochtitlan, I mean. See it for myself. Because that’s where we’re going to have to go, isn’t it? And photographs are one thing — everyone knows what Tenochtitlan looks like — but there’s nothing like an eyeball recce to give you a true idea of the nature of a place, its strengths, its weaknesses.”
Chel was encouraged by these words. “I think you should go. Definitely. Zotz can take you. He knows these parts well. Used to live at Tula, to the north.”
Stuart could put a face to the name and knew Zotz was Chel’s lieutenant, but beyond that he’d had little to do with the man. “He seems trustworthy.”
“Trustworthy!” Chel exclaimed. “Zotz would die for me, and I for him. I count him among my closest friends. I’m sure, once you and he have spent some time together, you’ll be able to say the same.”
During the journey to Lake Texcoco, Stuart didn’t feel that he and Zotz were becoming bosom buddies. Zotz seemed to have formed an opinion of him as an effete urbanite unused to hardship. And while there might be some truth in that, Stuart was determined to prove him wrong. As they trekked through the forest, Zotz hacking a path with a machete, he kept pace with him, didn’t lag behind. When it came to paddling the canoe, he gave it his all, tirelessly. He didn’t complain once or query Zotz’s lead. He rested only when Zotz decided to rest, never himself suggesting they take a break.
It wasn’t clear if any of this raised him in the Mayan’s estimation, but gradually Zotz began to treat him with less overt contempt. That had to be counted as positive progress.
Why did he want to get in this man’s good books, if he had no intention of accompanying Xibalba on their fool’s errand?
Stuart couldn’t answer that.
But he reckoned the Conquistador could.
TWELVE
3 Skull 1 Lizard 1 House
(Friday 7th December 2012)
They halted at midnight, mid-river. Zotz roped the canoe to a branch of a teak tree that had toppled into the water. The trunk reached almost all the way across to the opposite bank, like an unfinished bridge. They slept under blankets on the bare boards of the hull while the boat swung gently side to side in the current.
At first light they carried on, using the outboard now. The sound of the two-stroke motor putt-putting, as the boat cut through the tendrils of mist that drifted up from the river, was like someone lazily slapping congas. They passed hamlets where two or three families lived in cramped stilt-dwellings and eked an existence from fishing. Children waved as they went by — skinny, half-naked urchins, splashing barefoot in the shallows. “Hey, white man!” they yelled at Stuart. “Don’t melt in the sun!” It was a hilarious joke, worth repeating over and over until the butt of it was out of earshot. “Don’t melt like ice cream!”
Isolated communities of this kind could be found all over Anahuac, tribal folk living at subsistence level. It was one of the great ironies of the Empire that, while it had the wealth of the world at its disposal, its homeland was littered with pockets of extreme poverty. The Empire looked outward, and consequently paid little attention to what was on its doorstep. Outside the major metropolises — thriving industrial conurbations like Oaxaca, Palenque and Yaxchilan — the people of Anahuac benefited little from Imperial bounty. It was as though the Great Speaker took his own country for granted. Aztec hegemony had existed here for so long, it scarcely merited his interest any more. The newer conquests were more exciting, riper, worthier of cultivation.
No wonder, then, that anti-Empire sentiment was as rife in Anahuac as anywhere, fermenting in the wilds, in the darker, more distant reaches of the land. No wonder Xibalba could find a warm reception in so many places. The Empire wasn’t tending to its roots. That kind of neglect could lead to terminal rot.
Stuart and Zotz arrived back at the point they had set out from, a village that was little more than a landing stage with a handful of huts attached. Even as they approached, rounding a bend in the river, Stuart sensed there was something wrong. Yesterday there’d been noise and bustle, dogs scampering about, the inevitable pack of semi-feral children. Today, silence.
Nobody came out to greet them as they tied up the canoe at the jetty. Stuart’s ears detected furtive activity within the huts — muffled footfalls, hushed voices.
“What’s up?” he murmured to Zotz.
“No idea,” came the reply. “But I don’t like it.”
“Me either. We should move on upriver.”
“We hired the canoe here, we return it here. Besides, not much further on, the river becomes impassable. Rapids, rocks, waterfalls.”
As Zotz stepped out of the boat, he swore softly.
Jaguar Warriors had emerged from the largest of the buildings, which belonged to the canoe’s owner. There were four of them in all. Two had lightning guns, and Stuart could hear a faint whine. The weapons were charging.
“How should we handle this?” he said to Zotz out of the corner of his mouth as he, too, stepped onto the jetty.
“Play it by ear. It could be nothing, a routine visit.”
“If it isn’t? Those l-guns say they’re ready for trouble.”
“Anahuac Jaguars are always ready for trouble. Let me do the talking.” Zotz raised a hand in greeting. “Gentlemen! Good day to you. How are you this fine morning?”
The Jaguar group’s leader made a hand-slash gesture: cut the chitchat. “Who are you? Names.”
“Hunab Ku Zotz. And this is Rene Jolicoeur, a botanist from Fran
ce. I’m his guide. I’ve been taking him into the forest to study plants.”
“Botanist, huh?” The Jaguar eyed Stuart sceptically. “What particular plants in our country interest you?”
“Well, all of them, I suppose,” said Stuart. “The diversity of flora in the region is remarkable.”
We’re not going to pull this off, he thought. I know bugger-all about any of this stuff if he tries to cross-examine me. He calculated which of the Jaguars to attack first. One of the pair with guns stood close by. A few quick steps, a well-aimed jab to the throat, he could have the weapon out of the man’s hands, shoot the other gun holder before the element of surprise was lost.
“But especially,” said Zotz, “medicinal herbs. Monsieur Jolicoeur works for a pharmaceutical company based in… Rennes, is it?”
He looked to Stuart, who nodded.
“They’re constantly on the lookout for new drugs to develop from traditional natural remedies. Like jatoba bark.” Zotz took out a handful of his own supply from his pocket, to show the policemen. “It’s a huge market, and Anahuac is at the centre of it. As ever, the Land Between The Seas leads the way, and the rest of the world follows. What we have, everyone else desires.”
The Jaguars nodded to one another as though Zotz had uttered pearls of great wisdom.
“And Anahuac has provided the cure to all ills,” said Zotz, still pursuing his not-so-subtle subtext.
“True,” said the Jaguars’ leader. Abruptly he turned back to Stuart. “I’d like to see some ID, if I may.” He held out a hand. Stuart fished out his bogus passport.
He’ll see that it’s been doctored. He’ll ask me to show him plant samples I’ve collected. The whole charade was about to crumble to pieces. Stuart tensed, preparing himself for a quick, dirty fight.
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