Age of Aztec a-4

by James Lovegrove

  “We have to keep going,” said Chel. “But we should break out the weapons.”

  The guerrillas armed themselves from their backpacks. In addition to bolas and blowpipe, they had brought along more contemporary items, including a stolen lightning gun and several conventional rifles and pistols. Stuart was glad to strap his rapier on again and have his flechette gun holstered at his hip.

  They carried on in silence, bunched together, aiming wary looks in all directions. The forest seemed denser and more oppressive. Every shadow held something. The moss on the tree trunks took on humanoid shapes. Leaves made faces.

  One of the Mayans suddenly opened fire. A couple of the others joined in. They raked a thicket of rattan palm with bullets, scything the stems and spiky fronds. Chel ordered them to stop. As the echoes rumbled away across the hills he demanded to know why they were shooting.

  “I heard a sound,” said the man who had started it off. “A rustling.”

  “And I fired because he did,” said one of the others, and the third nodded in agreement.

  Chel approached the demolished thicket and peered in. He gave a sour smile.

  “Unless we’re being hunted by agoutis, I think we’re all right.”

  Everyone took a look at the bullet-riddled remains of the agouti. There wasn’t much of it left, but it was still just identifiable as a harmless rodent.

  Nervous laughter was accompanied by quips at the expense of the men who’d let rip with their guns. “Fancied some lunch, did you?” “What’s next, a big scary guinea pig?” and so on.

  “Onward, men,” said Chel. “And less of the itchy trigger fingers, if you don’t mind. Those reports will have carried for miles, and who knows who might have heard them.”

  An hour later, they took a break beside a stream. Cigars were smoked, water boiled for tea.

  Over the next ridge, Chel promised, lay their final destination. The trip was nearly over. There’d be food and beds, a roof over one’s head. All the comforts of home.

  Still, no one could quite relax. Even Stuart, who had little in the way of jungle instinct, was convinced they were not alone. There was someone out there lurking, observing him and the band of guerrillas. He felt this not just because the Mayans were thoroughly spooked: he could actually sense eyes on him. That primitive, ingrained intuition. You knew when you were being watched. You just knew. He’d experienced it in London and had assumed it was the Jaguars keeping tabs on him — although it had in fact been Xibalba as well — and he was feeling it again, now, strongly.

  The guerrillas were preparing to move out again when Zotz noticed the ants.

  He drew everyone’s attention to the insects quietly, calmly. Remaining unflappable whatever the circumstances was one of Zotz’s defining characteristics.

  “They’re big ones,” he said. “Everybody keep still. Let’s see where they’re going.”

  The ants marched in a column, a dozen abreast, trickling out from the undergrowth like a leaking liquid. They were big, each the size of an infant’s finger, and they were red-brown, the colour of dried blood. They were coming straight towards the cluster of men, thousands of antennae and legs bristling.

  “ Sauba ants,” Chel murmured. “Don’t let any get on you. They’re leaf cutters. Very sharp mandibles, very powerful too. They’ll give you a nasty bite and won’t let go.”

  Then another of the Mayans let out a hiss of dismay.

  “There’s more,” he said. “Coming the other way. Look.”

  A second column of sauba ants appeared from the opposite direction. They headed towards the first as if on a collision course. The guerrillas were sandwiched in between.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Chel. “This doesn’t happen. Ants go outwards from the central nest. They send out foraging parties in a radial pattern. You don’t get two lots at once like this.”

  “No one told that to these ants,” Stuart remarked. “Maybe they’re from different nests.”

  “Who cares?” said Tohil. “I’m not hanging around. I’m going that way.” He pointed to the side, away from both ant columns. Then his face fell. “Oh, fucking balls. There’s even more of them.”

  A third contingent of ants had appeared, approaching perpendicular to the other two. The guerrillas backed away, gathering in a huddle at the stream’s edge, clutching their weapons. All at once blowpipes, even guns, seemed wholly inadequate. You couldn’t deter ants with a bullet or a dart.

  The three columns of ants met and merged in the middle of the clearing. They became a single, almost perfectly circular carpet which expanded outwards as more of them fed into it. The perimeter of the carpet crept towards the guerrillas’ feet.

  “Cross the stream,” said Chel.

  His men didn’t need to be told twice. They splashed through the knee-deep water, retreating to the far side. There they waited to see what the ants would do next.

  Watching the insects, Stuart felt a horrified fascination, which he saw reflected in the expressions of the Mayans. Whether or not what the sauba ants were doing was standard practice for their species, there was something uncanny in the organisation they showed, the precision with which they coordinated themselves. It could of course be pure coincidence that they’d flowed in and overrun the space where a group of humans had happened to be sitting. But there seemed an element of deliberateness, even vindictiveness, in their actions. They’d not simply taken over, they’d ousted and occupied.

  And that wasn’t the end of it.

  Out of the scurrying ground-swirl of ants a pillar began to rise. It grew upwards, ant clambering over ant to add to it. Moments later a second pillar sprang up alongside. Each was several inches in diameter, and they climbed in parallel to a height of a metre or more.

  Then ants at the summits of both formed horizontal chains which reached out towards each other. The two chains joined, locking into position, and hundreds more ants charged up the pillars and got busy constructing a central pillar on top, this one oval in cross-section and as thick as a watermelon.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” Stuart said in English. The Mayans didn’t understand the words, but they recognised the tone well enough and echoed the sentiment in Nahuatl.

  The central pillar mounted and swelled before branching out on either side. The ants were now building downwards as well as up. Two new long extrusions descended while a third, a sphere, formed in the middle at the top. It was obvious — eerily obvious — that the ants were working according to a specific plan. This was no random agglomeration. It had purpose and design.

  Chel was the one who identified it first — saw the pattern, the overall aim.

  “A figure. Fuck my mother, a human figure.”

  And it was. It could be nothing else. Thousand upon thousand of the sauba ants had come together to create a life-size mannequin, a shifting thing composed of hard little bodies whose exoskeletons glittered dully in the sun. The head was bulbous, the limbs stocky and featureless, but it was unmistakably a representation of a person.

  All of a sudden the ten-foot span of the stream didn’t seem wide enough. Stuart wanted to be as far away as was humanly possible from this… this thing.

  Then the ant mannequin raised an arm towards the guerrillas.

  As one, the Xibalba men responded with an involuntary communal groan of horror. Stuart joined in.

  That was when Ah Balam Chel, who had the lightning gun and more presence of mind than most, decided enough was enough. He slapped down the l-gun’s charge lever. He rotated the setting dial to maximum. The men beside him were still giving voice to their dread, and the ant mannequin still lifting its arm with appalling, zombie-like slowness, the sauba ants clambering over each other. A light winked blue on the side of the lightning gun, signalling readiness. Chel took aim and pulled the trigger.

  The plasma bolt blasted the ant mannequin, dead centre in its body mass. One moment there was a rust-coloured figure on the other side of the stream. The next, it had disintegrated into se
veral thousand individual components. Ants and bits of ant sprayed everywhere like confetti.

  The parts of the mannequin not directly hit by the l-gun collapsed. The carpet of ants in which the figure had stood recoiled, a shockwave passing through it in concentric ripples. Order became chaos. The sauba ants dashed in all directions in a mad panic. They disappeared into the undergrowth they had emerged from, a marauding army put to rout. In less than a minute all that remained of them was a scattering of body parts on the ground — charred abdomens, frazzled thoraxes, tiny exploded heads, legs fried to a crisp.

  It was a while before anybody could speak.

  “We imagined that, right?” said one of the Mayans. “Please tell me we did. Too damn long in the forest. A mass hallucination.”

  “I wish it was,” said Zotz.

  “What the hell is going on?” said Tohil. “I mean, that wasn’t just ants. That was… ants gone crazy.”

  Stuart looked at Chel.

  “I don’t think,” the Xibalba leader began, “that that was anything. Ants can arrange themselves into structures. It’s been recorded. Bridges across crevices, between trees, to reach food or prey. Huge ball-shaped bivouacs that serve as temporary nests while they’re migrating. This was just that.”

  “But it looked like — ”

  Chel chopped Tohil off, his voice an axe. “It didn’t look like anything. We thought it did, but it didn’t. Our minds made us think what we were seeing was a particular shape, but that was an accident of vision. The tendency people have to — what’s the word? — anthropomorphise things.”

  “But you yourself said — ”

  “I was wrong,” Chel snapped, shouldering the l-gun. “I was wrong and that’s an end of it. Nothing just happened. We saw some ants, that is all, nothing more. Am I making myself clear?”

  There were hesitant nods all round.

  “Good. Then gather up your belongings and let’s get on with it.”

  He set off at a fast lick. Everyone else exchanged glances and the odd shrug, and followed.

  Stuart reckoned he wasn’t alone in thinking that Ah Balam Chel had been too quick to debunk the bizarre phenomenon they had all just witnessed.

  The man’s eyes had given it away.

  He was profoundly unnerved and did not like feeling that way. Did not like it at all.

  FIFTEEN

  Same Day

  Come noon, they emerged into a large clearing in the forest. The first thing Stuart noticed was a medium-range aerodisc parked on the grass. It was hard to miss, as it filled a good two thirds of the available space. A huge square of camouflage netting was stretched over it, with a garnish of vines, moss and other plant matter to make the disguise complete. The disc would be impossible to spot from the air, even to a vessel passing just a couple of hundred feet above.

  Near the aerodisc was a small plank-built cabin, its roof so overgrown with foliage that it too was effectively camouflaged. Beside the cabin sat a row of tents, military issue, made of green jungle-pattern canvas. A small waterfall gurgled nearby, cascading into a deep, limpid pool. The surrounding trees formed a sturdy stockade.

  This was the forward operating base Chel had spoken of.

  A pretty, petite woman stepped out from behind one of the legs of the aerodisc’s landing gear. She was dressed in dungarees and wiping her hands on an oily rag. Seeing Chel, she let out a cry of delight and made a beeline for him. She leapt on him, scissoring her legs around his waist, and they kissed passionately for several minutes, or at least so it seemed to those watching.

  “That’s Chimalmat,” Zotz informed Stuart.

  “Mrs Chel?”

  “They’re not married, though they might as well be, the way they argue sometimes. Chimalmat’s our resident mechanic, in case you couldn’t guess. She’s been out here for weeks maintaining that disc, keeping the damp and the bugs from getting into the works. She and the boss don’t like being apart for that long, so I doubt we’ll be seeing either of them for the next few hours, if you catch my drift.”

  Sure enough, Chel and Chimalmat disappeared into the aerodisc. She said she had something to show him, some technical problem she needed to discuss with him. He replied that he would give the matter his full attention and do all he could to help out. If either of them thought this coded talk was fooling anyone, they were sorely mistaken. Probably neither cared. They were like a pair of horny teenagers.

  The guerrillas chose tents for themselves, dumping their backpacks in front as claim markers. The tents were two-man, but there were enough of them that not everyone had to share. Stuart, for instance, had one to himself. The cabin was for Chel and Chimalmat’s exclusive use, their little love nest.

  Some of the guerrillas clambered into the relative coolness of their tents for a nap. Others went out to bathe in the pool and wash their clothes. Everyone was careful not to mention the events of the past twelve hours, the strange visitations in the forest. Chel had made it clear that topic of conversation was embargoed. There had been no weirdness. Nothing just happened. End of story.

  Zotz broke out a patillo board and found two of his fellow Mayans to play with. Stuart was invited to make up a four. He refused at first; Patillo was an Empire game, and for that reason alone, he scorned it. It was also far too dependent on the roll of the dice for his liking. Little skill involved. Zotz insisted, however, and in the end Stuart relented.

  They played several games, betting with matchsticks. The dice fell in Stuart’s favour often enough that he won twice, getting all his four pieces home first. In general, however, Zotz was the victor. He had a knack for throwing just the right number he needed to capture an opponent’s piece or occupy one square with two of his own pieces and form a blockade.

  “Luck, that’s all it is,” he told Stuart as he packed up the board afterwards. “I’ve always been lucky.”

  “That would account for your permanently sunny disposition.”

  “Don’t push it, Englishman,” came the reply. “Just because Chel thinks you’re hot shit, doesn’t mean we all have to. Frankly, nothing I’ve seen from you yet has impressed me. The Conquistador’s supposed to be this big action hero, but the evidence says otherwise. Big pussy more like. Always getting himself into difficulties. Screwing up at the crucial moment. If you ask me, we can manage without you, and we should. You’ll be nothing but a millstone round our necks.”

  For punctuation, Zotz hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat it at Stuart’s feet.

  The other two patillo players waited to see how Stuart would respond. The spitting was out-and-out provocation. Nobody could let an insult like that pass unchallenged.

  Stuart had no alternative. Zotz had set things up well and selected his moment with care. Ah Balam Chel wasn’t around to intervene and defuse the situation. This was where something got settled. Zotz didn’t hate Stuart; he just wanted the Englishman to prove his mettle, with other Xibalba men present to see it happen.

  “Pussy, huh?” Stuart said. “Well, that’s better than being a big fat cheat.”

  “What did you just call me?”

  “You heard. I saw you spinning the dice rather than throwing them. Pathetic, really. I mean, if there’d been money on the table, then I could understand. But in a friendly game? For matchsticks? That’s just sad.”

  “Say that again.” Zotz bellied up to Stuart. He was shorter by several inches, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Which part? The part about being a cheat, or the part about being pathetic?”

  “You want pathetic? I’ll tell you what pathetic is. It’s getting your butt kicked by a woman. We all saw that Jaguar detective taking you down, shoving you into the river mud. No self-respecting man should let himself be bested like that — by a girl half his size.”

  “Speaking of half my size, what’s the weather like down there, shrimp?”

  “I prefer ‘piranha.’ I eat big sluggish catfish like you for breakfast.”

  This wasn’t going to stop at putdo
wns, and both of them knew it. Blows would have to be traded too.

  Might as well get it over with.

  Stuart threw the first punch. Zotz was quick and ducked, then retaliated with a jab to Stuart’s midriff.

  What followed was vicious and inelegant. Stuart couldn’t decide if the fight was a genuine grudge match or just for show. Both, he thought. Zotz certainly didn’t hesitate to play dirty, trying head-butts and ball grabs and even going for an eye gouge. Stuart blocked, warding off all of the Mayan’s attacks, and in return he employed every close-combat technique the Eagles had taught him, aiming for nerve clusters and vulnerable spots such as the floating rib and the Adam’s apple. He had no wish to injure Zotz seriously, and he sensed the feeling was mutual. At the same time, it had to look authentic. They both had to acquit themselves well. Otherwise honour would not be served and Zotz would have nothing to show for picking the fight in the first place.

  The other guerrillas gathered round to egg on the fighters. The noise roused the ones indoors and brought them out. Soon everyone was cheering Stuart and Zotz on with gusto. Nobody was taking sides. They were simply relishing watching a good scrap.

  The two combatants ended up on the ground, scuffling like junkyard dogs. They rolled and hammered and elbowed and kneed, eventually falling into the pool. They reared up from the water and went at each other. They crashed under the surface sideways and staggered upright again.

  Stuart was tiring; the Mayan, too. They lumbered together in a bear hug, scrabbling below the water with their feet to kick each other’s legs from under them. They toppled simultaneously and rose to their knees, panting furiously. They grabbed each other’s shirtfronts, holding each other up now rather than brawling. One of Zotz’s eyes was swelling shut. Stuart could feel blood pouring from his nose.

  “Enough!”

  It was Chel, striding across the clearing, doing up his belt as he went. Chimalmat was close behind, fastening one strap of her dungarees back into place.

  “What is this?” the Xibalba leader bellowed. “I leave you alone for two minutes and a brawl breaks out? Explain yourselves!”