On the highest, holiest night in Tenochtitlan, it was unseemly for the people to be out in the streets celebrating, and the jaguar-priests feared that so much joy could only arouse the wrath of the god they honored.
At the head of the procession, flanked by his eight companions and four warriors, his four concubines and a horde of cheering spectators, the ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca capered and piped skirling plumes of languidly ecstatic song down the avenues and alleys of the imperial capital. Despite his obvious exhaustion, his suit of feathers and bells jingled a merry rhythm for the crowd to clap in time, and Ahuac, the high priest of the Smoking Mirror, noted with bored horror how they dared to look directly upon him, and hid their faces only when Ahuac marched past on the bed of crushed flower petals in the ixiptla’s wake.
Chosen from the prisoners taken in flowery combat with one of the neighboring cities, the ixiptla became the living vessel of Tezcatlipoca for a year. Showered with comforts such as the lords themselves could only covet, and bearing at the end of his reign the quetzal-plumed crown of the king himself, he paraded through the streets each night to remind the Mexica by whose grace they lived and prospered.
The ixiptla was a figure of dreadful authority, the god incarnate, and never so much as when he raged at his captors, cursed the Mexica, pleaded for his life or tried to escape. Tezcatlipoca was the arch-sorcerer, the Great Night who wrought the doom of Tula when the Toltecs denied him human flesh. In his palm danced the warrior god Huitzilopochtli, who drove the Mexica from nomadic poverty to lordship over an empire uniting the shattered Seven Tribes of Aztlan. But he was also the Smoking Mirror, god of deceit and contradiction, and lived to sow disaster among the gifts he brought, to remind the people that the world was unjust.
For his part, Ahuac was most displeased with this year’s ixiptla, and began to doubt the value of the entire ritual. This avatar of the god, a lewdly handsome captain from Tlacopan, confounded them. In battle, he had split thirty skulls before he was captured, yet under the raiment of Tezcatlipoca, he had become meek and mad as a village shaman. He was never seen to eat, yet he gave gifts of food from his robes, stolen from the lords’ banquets, for the poor. He blessed beggars and children, and gave them tiny toy jaguars carved from the walls of his luxuriant cell.
The people flocked to him tonight, and sang blasphemous songs begging for him to be spared, or at least shared out amongst the mob, and Ahuac waved the soldiers closer for fear they might lose their minds and take him.
He still harbored the hope that this year’s incarnation might grant him that moment of essential communion with the Smoking Mirror, and a momentary glimpse of the future, which the king so desperately craved and feared. But after months of fasting and bleeding and mutilating himself, of maguey thorns in his tongue and penis until he could taste or feel nothing, Ahuac simply lusted to cut out his heart, visions or no, and nearly drooled at the prospect of dividing his flesh among the lords of the city.
The ixiptla waved to the crowd, and a shower of corn and chocolate fell from his sleeve, inciting a stampede. His concubines clucked at his trickery, and wondered too loud how he had kept his flesh so robust, if he took no food for himself. His prowess with the women had shamed the legends of the god, himself, they crowed. His ritual companions hissed at the waste of such fine fare on the peasantry.
“Ah, my servants,” asked the ixiptla, “will my flesh be devoured only by the lords of the city, and by the king and all the priests?”
His companions laughed and sang in slurred monkey-chatters. “Only the finest will eat you, O lord.”
The black and gold-painted face of the ixiptla split in an unseemly white grin. “Then what will the poor have to eat? On what holy day will they have the honor of eating you, and so sharing in the gift of my flesh?”
When the last of the city lay behind them, they made their way through the crush of peasants to the waters of Tezcoco, where a canopied canoe awaited the ixiptla’s party. Behind the phallic water-dog mask of Xolotl, executioner of the gods to feed the sun, Ahuac gulped blood from his mangled tongue and forced himself through the prescribed sermon: on the midnight glory of Tezcatlipoca, on the vital symbolism of his final journey to the shrine of Tlapitzahuayan, where he shed his godhood and offered himself up for the holiday feast. He had to shout to be heard over the sounds of the people weeping.
The party made haste to the canoe, and Ahuac ordered the soldiers to harrow the crowds after someone shied a stone at him. The ixiptla climbed into the boat and took his place on the jaguar mat as if he had done this every year. As they pushed off, the rotted golden light of the moon dazzled the priest so he stumbled at the gunwale, and the ixiptla steadied him. Ahuac shrank away, sneering, “Glut yourself on their fickle worship, O Great Night, for you’ll find no such fare on your journey beneath the earth.”
The grin of the ixiptla was the moon multiplied. “But will I not rise to hear them again, as I do every year, for am I not your god?”
At the far shore, Ahuac saw that the crowds had already encircled the ancient shrine. The peasants swarmed the ixiptla as he set foot on the mud, and the priest’s heart faltered as he lost sight of him for a moment. But the living god gently pulled himself free and urged them back, taking his place in the ritual with a feverish glee. Ahuac thought he saw something pass from the crowd into his hands, and had him searched, but found nothing. No unclean blood must soil this holy ground, so Ahuac merely ordered the crowd beaten back, and cleared the path to the pyramid.
The ixiptla performed his part of the ritual well enough, breaking a reed flute on each step as he climbed towards Ahuac, who awaited him at the sanctuary atop the shrine. The priest was glad for the mask of Xolotl, for he feared what others might make of the look on his face as he beckoned the ixiptla up to the sacrificial stone.
There were no litanies to sing here, no sermons to waste on the shameless mob of children besieging the shrine. No mere words could brand them with the truth of what it meant to reach out to the gods; to them, a god was a clown bearing gifts. If the annual cycle of the ixiptla dragged on agonizingly, at least its culmination would be swift, the moment of ascension so eagerly anticipated would wash away all uncertainty.
As the ixiptla climbed the last step, legs trembling with fatigue, he murmured, “You must envy me, priest, for I shall go to the warrior’s paradise denied your kind.”
“I doubt it,” Ahuac answered, giving vent to all the gall of a lifetime. “I have communed with the heart’s blood of more men than you have in your city, and have tasted only fear of the black cloud that hides their faces. I think we have fallen from favor with our gods, and I cannot say whither your nagual will fly when I let it loose. Most likely, it will merely rot in the bellies of the lords.”
“Then whence came the order of the god to raid Tlacopan, O my priest?”
“I gave it myself,” Ahuac made the mask grin, thinking this last would melt the ixiptla’s bravado, but he only nodded and smiled back.
The ixiptla meekly lay down on the altar, baring his chest to Ahuac’s obsidian blade. The priest noticed that the ixiptla’s flesh was indeed not so withered as he had expected, given that he took no food for a year. His lips and tongue were stained black, as if he’d eaten his face-paint.
The ixiptla laughed, sly eyes ensnaring Ahuac’s as he gagged on black foam. “I have not starved, all these months, my priest. I feasted on snakes and scorpions and poisonous frogs, which the poor gave to me in return for your fine food, and tonight, I have eaten enough to kill even your god. You Mexica are so chained to your rituals; you are more a slave than I. If you do not eat this flesh, your terrible lord will hurl earthquakes and plagues on the city… but this meat is death.”
The ixiptla shuddered, and bile leaked from his slack mouth, his muscles going to water beneath his painted skin. “Will you taste my name, priest? Will you savor my courage? My heart is a codex of venom. It holds all the future you need to see.”
“At last,” Ahuac hissed, “y
ou reveal yourself.” The priest removed his mask and showed his face to the sacrifice. He raised the obsidian knife over the ixiptla and cracked his chest wide, as he had done it hundreds of times here and thousands in his dreams, ripped out his heart and held it up for the ixiptla to see.
Close before his clouding eyes, Ahuac bit into the beating heart and gorged himself on the envenomed blood. Choking now as it mingled with his own, Ahuac said, “Your name is Tezcatlipoca.”
Even as his own strength began to fail, Ahuac ordered the body of the ixiptla to be prepared for the feast.
He pulled up to the crosswalk at Hinterland and Blossom, in a big goddamned rush, but not too much rush to stop for a pedestrian. When citizens shirk their duties to their fellow man, he reminded himself to soothe the nervous twitch in his leg muscles as he braked, then everything goes to hell.
But the human toadstool just stayed planted on the curb, digging at a ragweed sprouting from a crack with one shiftless toe. Maybe lost, maybe just visiting this planet, but he was wasting the driver’s time. The selfishness of the patient black smear made him see red. “Enough’s enough, ped; move ‘em or lose ‘em.”
He kneaded the wheel, gunned his engine to urge him along, but no dice. Hours passed behind the driver’s sweat-streaked brow, an unforgivable sentence, until finally, the slacker feebly waved him on, evidently satisfied he’d stolen a sufficient chunk of the driver’s life. Standing still as a portrait on the corner, hooded from the rapacious blade of his stare. He peeled out to regain the lost time, but mostly to blow off steam, shouting out his window, “What makes you think you’re worth running over?”
The next day, in an unusually big goddamned rush, due to the sheets of black sleet holding traffic down to a blind baby’s crawl, he burned down Hinterland through the red light at Blossom with his gas foot crushed to the floor.
Shimmying across smoky black glass like a needle on a grooveless record, bathed in the dim red stoplight bloodglow, as the walker on the curb went all eyes to take him in. Sucker’s eyes. Twice shy and no time to spare playing the clown for another stinking ped. Off the curb at the light’s indifferent command to WALK, spasming like an epileptic bullfighter in an involuntary veronica, his foot snatched back from the scissorblade tire and scarred gunmetal tarmac, suddenly as precious as found money.
In any orderly society, thinks the driver, easing down on the accelerator to turn onto Victory Circle, in any one that really works, there’s got to be give and take, or everything just goes to hell.
“God-dog-damned if I’m gonna let some hot-rodder holier-than-y’all motherfucker run me down,” swore the pedestrian, breathless, at the tiny, faraway car. Shook his red windbreaker over his head. He wandered away from Hinterland, down Warren, where the dark burns brighter than any light. Kicking a trail through scattered trash, fists balled in pockets. Into a hole in the wall to recover, regroup, and strategize.
He felt his reflexive anger taking root in reason and unfurling to entangle his mind in red shoots of hate. He was alive, wasn’t he? A faceless stranger had tried to take that life, for no other reason than that he could, because he had a car. Sick mothers, every one of them foaming at the mouth, looking to get put down. He watched Hinterland out his barred window.
He felt it swell into a tower inside him that night on Hinterland and Luddite, only to fall when he threw a brick at the next speeder was too important to let him stop at the crosswalk. He went home to get a beer, at peace with the world.
His fiberglass bodywork was smashed to hell, remolded and repainted at stellar cost—the computerized custom paint-matching alone ate up a paycheck—that his insurance company deftly squirmed out of paying. The assaulted driver now saw the street’s camouflaged threats with new eyes. The meaningless blurs resolved when he slowed to pace them into sinister shapes brandishing weapons under coats and behind packages, pretending to buy drugs or forage for change in payphones, huddling, plotting to take their frustrations out on their betters. He cruised late into the nights down alleys and avenues in questionable areas to show he was not afraid.
His new vision bore fruit during a night patrol on Hinterland and Conquistador, when the ped sent by his nemesis charged out in front of his car from behind a burning pay latrine, one arm cocked to seal his fate. His independent suspension bore out the impact without spilling his coffee. When they stopped him at Hinterland and Cassandra, it was all he could do not to bust out laughing.
The injury to his grillwork and rightside turn signal would cost much less than the damage caused by the brick. He realized how much smoother it would go to play dumb and keep his motive to himself. They knew the score, and would only have to look him in the eye to know the truth, but no one did. An accomplice had removed the pedestrian attacker’s weapon from the scene before anyone had seen it, complicating any self-defense case he might try to make. He would ride out his probation and suspended license with a clean conscience and, most importantly, no fear.
The slain pedestrian’s widower found himself aimlessly wandering the streets in the freezing rain coming back from the hospital. He studied the slick gray asphalt scrolling beneath him alongside the black tarmac, separate and supremely unequal, looking for chalk outlines. Upon reaching the northbound Conquistador crosswalk, he stopped cold and began to cry.
This was where it happened. This was the scene. His grief eroded into panic as the gauntlet of idling automobiles, held back only by the blind blinking lights, honked their horns, daring him to step into the no man’s land of the intersection.
“Got stage fright, asshole?” someone behind the headlights shouted and gunned his engine. After what seemed like days of chewing his lip the pedestrian waved them sheepishly on from the curb…
Saturday mornings, rain or shine, Jubal Gibbons and his son, Caleb, walked neighborhood rounds, spreading the Word.
By age seven, Caleb had already deduced that very few of their neighbors had any real interest in God’s message, and nobody seemed to want to hear it from Father. At thirteen, he sleepwalked through the agonizing ordeal with the weary aplomb of late middle age. He knew which houses had kids from school, and hid until the door slammed in Father’s face. He knew which houses had lonely weirdoes who would suffer an afternoon of Father’s sermons just for the company, but never convert. He knew when he could catch a decent nap just out of earshot, until the loud call to prayer jolted him out of dreams of watching TV and talking to girls.
Father did this not because the church expected it of him, but as penance. He knew his naked faith scared or offended most decent suburban folk, and banged his head against their repulsion as a way of demonstrating his total commitment to his God. Sometimes he volunteered to help with yardwork or chores in return for a shared prayer vigil. They drank beer and laughed at him as he raked their lawns, and never warmed to his faith. Jubal didn’t seem to care, or else he buried it so deep that it only came out as a more intense, angry silence.
Why he brought Caleb, when it was clear his son had other things on his mind, had taken longer to unravel, but with nothing but church pamphlets and his pocket Bible to read, he’d had a lifetime of Saturdays to mull it over. God did not speak to Caleb as He had to Jubal, who heard the Lord with such stunning intensity that he’d been committed twice. Surely Caleb, with his mumbled, cracking prayers and sweaty, fidgeting hands, could only spook the heathens and queer the pitch.
Father had no hope of kindling a torch of faith in his son, who’d been ruined by public school, but dragged him through the godforsaken backwaters of their neighborhood to peek into the homes of strangers and show him how they lived without God in their lives—the hangovers, the neglected children, the smut coming out of the TV. Never did the endless, episodic lecture turn to why the godless houses were larger and nicer than theirs, or why the sinners who lived in them had better jobs and were still married, and home on Saturday with squeaky-clean consciences.
On rainy days, they rode in the old Pacer with the leaky moon roof, but on sunn
y summer days like this, Father brought an extra sheaf of pamphlets. They started in their own neighborhood, and walked until every pamphlet had been delivered.
As he limped the last mile of their route on this blistering late August day, with his feet swollen halfway out of his cheap brown shoes and the grubby canvas pamphlet bag chafing the calluses around his wrist, Caleb daydreamed about the Pacer with its AC that blew only smoky engine heat, windows that only rolled halfway down, broken bumper festooned with embarrassing bumper stickers—MY GOD IS AN AWESOME GOD; FOLLOW ME TO SALVATION; HAVE YOU HEARD THE WORD MADE FLESH?
He dreamed of Father actually making just one sincere convert, and ascending bodily up to Heaven like the Prophets of old, or maybe just chucking the pamphlets in the gutter and leaving Caleb in front of a bar. Either would be fine.
Caleb despised the Mormons who breezed past them on their ten-speeds, wind ballooning their short-sleeve white shirts out behind them.
Father came to the door of a house they had visited every month for the last eight years, though the man who lived there never answered. The door opened as Father raised his fist to knock. A magazine girl staggered out, her laminated conversation card in hand and her shirt half-unbuttoned. Her face was flushed, and the man inside the door wore a bathrobe and a bestial grin.
Jubal railed at the house until the sinner threatened to call the police. Caleb had to drag his father away. He was disgusted with his own excitement over the episode, but couldn’t condemn her. At least she got inside. At least she was selling something somebody wanted.
If Caleb hoped Father would be moved to give up for the day, he should have known better. As they split their dry tuna sandwich and a mushy Bartlett pear on the concrete bench in a neighborhood park, Jubal studied the street map on his clipboard and slashed at it with a felt tip marker. “We’ve tried and tried with this area, and none will hear us. They are dead to the word.”
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 6
