Age of Aztec

FOUR

7 Movement 1 Monkey 1 House

(Wednesday 28th November 2012)

The spotlights around the Regent’s Park amphitheatre dimmed, and the audience hushed. The stage lights came up. The performance began.

A woman entered from the wings, dressed as the hermaphroditic god/goddess Ometeotl, half male, half female. She performed an elaborate, graceful dance set to a score that fused traditional instruments — clay flutes and ocarinas, mainly — with a contemporary pop rhythm. As she darted from one side of the stage to the other, her stance and style changed. On the left, she was all stomping, square-shouldered machismo. On the right, she was lighter-footed, more feminine.

She was Oneness In Duality, the coming together of opposites. She was the primordial flux that existed before the first great age. She was neither one thing nor the other, and both at once.

Her dance culminated in a symbolic birth. As the music crescendoed, from between Ometeotl’s legs (and up through a trapdoor) the Four Who Rule Supreme emerged.

First came Quetzalcoatl, resplendent in feathers and scales.

Next, Tezcatlipoca in a dark mirror-bedecked costume, amid swirls of smoke.

Then Huitzilopochtli, the wings on his back blurring like a hummingbird’s.

Finally hideous Xipe Totec, the Flayed One.

They were followed by Tlaloc, lord of rain and lightning, and a rapid procession of lesser deities, including the thirteen Lords of the Day and the nine Lords of the Night.

As Ometeotl faded into the background, his/her work done, the Four Who Rule Supreme danced around Tlaloc in a circle, each at his respective cardinal compass point. Then began a series of individual dances, accompanied by corps members representing the beings who lived during each of the first four great ages.

Primitive earth dwellers, giants who could uproot whole trees with their bare hands, thundered about in the first age, whose ruler was Tezcatlipoca.

Tezcatlipoca was supplanted violently by Quetzalcoatl. The two gods were born rivals, dark versus light, uncertainty versus stability, cunning versus integrity. Quetzalcoatl’s age was an age of air and wind, and his subjects were monkey men who flew among the treetops like leaves on the breeze.

Tezcatlipoca returned and struck Quetzalcoatl to the ground, usurping him. The third great age was a time of rain, and Tlaloc was set in place as its lord and master by Tezcatlipoca. Quetzalcoatl brought it to a close with a downpour of fire from the sky, which wiped out the global population of winged, turkey-like folk.

The fourth age belonged to Chalchiuhtlicue, jade-skirted goddess of streams and still water. Amphibious fish men thrived in this time, which ended in a massive, all-erasing flood.

The next age began with Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca setting aside their differences and suing for peace, since up until now their strife had inflicted so much carnage and devastation. The two moved in beautiful balletic unison, mirroring each other’s posture and gestures, to an elegant, waltz-like tune.

To mark their truce they collaborated in the slaughter of the she-beast Tlaltecuhtli. Transforming themselves into giant serpents, they seized the many-mouthed monster and tore her to bits. From her mutilated body a fresh world was formed. Her hair became vegetation. Her eye sockets became caves. Hills and valleys were her nose, mountains her shoulders.

This miraculous if messy metamorphosis was rendered through a variety of forms of stagecraft: props, puppetry, mime, and shifts in the lighting that revealed backdrop images painted on successive layers of scrim. The audience appreciated it immensely, cheering and applauding as the fifth great age — the current age — took shape before their eyes.

But where were the people? Who would inhabit the earth now? Quetzalcoatl descended into the underworld, Mictlan, to retrieve bones of the ancestor races, from which he intended to create a brand new race. Mictlantecuhtli, the Dark One, the god who presided over Mictlan, tried to trick and entrap him, but Quetzalcoatl outsmarted him at every turn. He evaded the Dark One’s devious snares and surfaced victorious with an armful of broken bones. These he handed to the snake goddess Cihuacoatl, who ground them to powder in a bowl. Then every god donated drops of blood, Cihuacoatl mixed it all together, and hey presto, humans appeared.

Again, the audience loved it, including the twenty-strong group of priests who occupied the best seats in the house. While everyone else had to make do with hard, bleacher-like benches, the priests sat in cushioned comfort on a specially erected platform at the centre of the amphitheatre’s arc. Bowls of fresh fruit and maize snacks had been laid on for them, and they were regularly doused with a mist of insect repellent to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The platform blocked the view of the stage for dozens of people in the rows behind, but nothing could be done about it and nobody complained. The presence of priests at the performance was indisputably an honour and, thanks to the theatre’s publicity department, had been heavily touted in the press and on TV. The show ran nightly, weather permitting, but never until this evening had any of their holinesses attended, and in such numbers too. The dancers and actors were, as a consequence, giving it their all, and the audience members were doing their bit by showing more than usual enthusiasm for the action onstage — even those who couldn’t see much more than the backs of the priests’ heads.

After the interval, the performance switched from dance to drama, in order to tell how the non-aggression pact between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca foundered and the god of smoke and mirrors played a vile trick on his brother.

The original text of this play was said to date back to Shakespeare, who composed it towards the end of his life after becoming a secret convert to the Aztec faith. Of course it was never staged in his lifetime, nor during the many calendar rounds that followed, at least not in public. With the Aztec Empire busy storming the gates of Europe and threatening to lay siege to Britain, that would have been tantamount to treason. Only after Britain finally fell to the Empire, just over a hundred solar years ago, did the play emerge into the light of day.

By then, Shakespeare would have been hard pushed to recognise it. His draft — assuming it ever existed — had been handed down through the generations orally. A process of continual revision and updating had taken place with each clandestine rendition. Lines had been added and removed. New scenes had been improvised, old ones discarded.

The basic narrative, however, which every schoolchild learned almost as soon as he or she could talk, stayed the same. The story beats were as familiar to people as the beats of their own hearts.

One day, Tezcatlipoca held up his scrying mirror to Quetzalcoatl, promising to reveal to him his true face.

The mirror falsely showed, not a magnificent god in the prime of his life, but a withered, decayed old man with a long white beard.

“This,” said Tezcatlipoca, “is the truth of what you are — the truth of all flesh.”

Quetzalcoatl was appalled; repelled.

To calm him in his agitation, Tezcatlipoca gave him a goblet of pulque laced with magic mushrooms.

Quetzalcoatl took a sip. Liked it. Drank deep.

He fetched his younger sister, Quetzalpetlatl, and made her drink too.

They lay together, the siblings, inebriated beyond all sense and propriety. They copulated. They slept.

The following morning, Quetzalcoatl, utterly ashamed, took his leave of the world. He could rule it no longer, not after committing the sin of incest. He was not worthy.

The other gods elected to go with him, even deceitful Tezcatlipoca, who was likewise ashamed by his own behaviour.

They left behind them the sum of their knowledge and wisdom — their arts, their crafts, their technology — for humans to use as they saw fit.

And they bestowed the gift of eternal life on one man, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II, who would forever after be known as the Great Speaker and would rule in the gods’ stead, their voice on earth.

The Great Speaker’s word was law. All who lived in Anahuac obeyed him, and in time all who lived in the rest of the world would too.

His destiny was to extend the realm of the Aztecs beyond the Land Between The Seas until it covered every land and every sea.

It was a destiny he gladly embraced.

The appointment of Moctezuma II as the Great Speaker provided the play’s climax and was the moment everyone looked forward to. Traditionally it had to be a spectacular theatrical coup, as the old, mortal Moctezuma vanished and was replaced by a masked, robed figure who appeared as if from nowhere, conjured into being by the Four Who Rule Supreme. Sometimes there would be thunderflashes, sometimes wreaths of dry ice. Sometimes the Great Speaker would rise from below, sometimes descend from above. It didn’t really matter how he came on, as long he did so in a majestic and magical fashion.

In this particular production, the actor lucky enough to have been given the role of His Imperial Holiness was lowered from the flies on a harness. Stroboscopic lights flickered all around him. Sound cues mimicked a tropical storm. Huge electric fans stirred up a kind of onstage cyclone. Everything was designed to give the impression of power and might, the crackle of primal energy, the churn of vast creative forces.

The audience was so dazzled and deafened that, at first, no one noticed that the figure who was supposed to be the Great Speaker didn’t actually resemble the Great Speaker at all.

Slowly it dawned on them. Where was the extravagant, floor-sweeping robe? Where was the full-head mask — that near-featureless slab of gold?

Confusion turned to consternation, and then to fear.

Centre stage, surrounded by a very perplexed-looking quartet of actors portraying Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totec, stood…

…the Conquistador.

Who fixed the audience with a gimlet stare and shouted, “Bullshit!”

The barrage of effects stopped abruptly, some backstage technician realising that the show had just been hijacked and leaping to hit the off button.

“This is a fiction,” the Conquistador went on, addressing the rows of slack-jawed faces in front of him. “A complete fabrication. Revisionist garbage. Don’t believe a word of it. Shakespeare never wrote any such play, no matter what they tell you, and it never became some kind of underground mystery cult kept alive by pro-Aztec secret societies, because there were no such things. Britain stood solidly against the Empire to the last. Anyone who says otherwise is simply being the Empire’s parrot. Our rulers would have us think we wanted to be conquered all along, and only the pigheadedness of our monarchy and parliament kept that from happening. The truth is, we defied the Empire’s encroachment to the bitter end, all of us, the entire British people, and it cost us dear. It brought our country to its knees. It starved us, bankrupted us, nearly destroyed us. But we clung on, with the enemy coming at us on every shore, until it became clear that to continue would be suicide. We were the last nation to fall, the bravest. This play — this travesty — this farce — came into life after the Aztec hordes overran us, not before.”

Some in the audience dared to boo. Others frowned, wondering whether there might not be something in what the Conquistador said.

From the priests, there was only stony silence.

The Conquistador peered imperiously around the amphitheatre. He had the stage, and an audience that was too startled and intimidated to move. He was going to make the most of it while he could.

“As for the Great Speaker,” he said, “he’s no more Moctezuma than I am. He isn’t immortal. Beneath that ridiculous mask there has been a succession of men — ordinary mortal men — who have played the role just as these actors here play theirs. One after another they assume the mantle of Great Speaker and give out orders and edicts from the Lake Palace at Tenochtitlan, and when each dies the next in line replaces him, and it is all done behind closed doors, amid a conspiracy of silence, and we are none the wiser. You know in your heart of hearts that I’m right. Nothing you’ve seen here tonight is real. What you’ve been watching is a lie. Artful propaganda. Stage managed in every sense. A myth masquerading as legend. And it’s all to help keep that lot” — he jabbed a finger at the priests — “in power. Reinforce their tyranny. Tighten their stranglehold still further.”

He unsheathed his rapier, to gasps and squeals.

“Well, you’re looking at a man who will not be strangled. A man who’s sick and tired of living under this regime and wants rid of it. They call me a terrorist. Maybe I am. But the only people who should be terrified of me are the hieratic caste and anyone who supports them.”

With that, he bounded over the footlights and off the front of the stage, making for the priests’ platform. Panicking audience members leapt from their seats and ran shrieking. Their Holinesses themselves seemed rooted to the spot, paralysed by fear. They exchanged looks, as if to ask how this could have happened, how it could be that so many of them at once were about to become the Conquistador’s next victims.

The Conquistador sprang up onto the platform.

“Should’ve thought this through a bit better, shouldn’t you?” he crowed. “You arrogant bastards. Not one Jaguar Warrior bodyguard? Talk about sitting ducks.”

“Actually,” said one of the priests, the tallest of them, “I think you’ll find you’re the sitting duck.”

The Conquistador cocked his head. “Oh, yes? And how do you work that out?”

“Well…” The priest reached beneath his chair and snatched out the macuahitl concealed there.

All the others did exactly the same thing.

Behind his mask, the Conquistador’s face fell. His eyes gave it away. A moment of pure, uncomprehending shock.

The priests, as one, rose.

“No Jaguar Warriors, mate?” sneered the tall one. “Try twenty of them!”

In her seat, five rows back from the platform, Chief Inspector Mal Vaughn watched with satisfaction as her trap was sprung.

Really, it was a surprise the Conquistador had fallen for it. Mal had had her doubts he would. Surely he’d be too smart. Surely he’d think that it was just too blatant. Twenty priests unexpectedly attending a show at an open-air theatre in the middle of a park? A venue where watertight security was virtually impossible? It must have been screaming STAY AWAY! to him.

But no, he hadn’t stayed away. He’d come charging in, unable to resist the bait.

That fitted with the psychological impression Mal had built up of him. He was a narcissist. He enjoyed the big gesture, the grandstanding performance. He liked to make an impact.

All the same, she was vaguely disappointed. Somehow she’d felt he was cannier than this.

The bogus priests moved in on the Conquistador, swords aloft. He backed away a couple of steps.

Mal’s masterstroke was that there was no way the Conquistador could have suspected the priests were not what they appeared to be. To impersonate a priest — hieratic fraud — was one of the most heinous offences on the statute books. The punishment was a litany of hideous tortures. You would have skewers driven through your most sensitive parts. You would be flayed alive. Your skinned body would be roasted over hot coals. You would then, if not already dead, be disembowelled and, for good measure, beheaded. And the same treatment would be visited on every single member of your immediate family. Even your cousins, even your pets, would not be immune. It was something only a lunatic would consider doing.

Chief Superintendent Kellaway had laughed at Mal when she’d suggested disguising a squad of Jaguars as priests. Then he’d realised she was deadly serious, and he’d laughed again, this time scornfully. It would never happen, he’d said. The High Priest would never allow it.

But he might, Mal had insisted. He might make a special dispensation, in this one instance, if he could be convinced that it was the best, the only way of drawing out the Conquistador and catching him unawares. Could the chief super just try? Ask him? Plead?

In the event, the High Priest had gone for the idea and granted permission. Twenty Jaguar Warriors had had their heads shaved and their skin adorned with non-permanent tattoo designs, the customary assortment of iguanas and quetzals and hieroglyphs. They had spent hours practising how to sit, stand and behave in a priestly manner. Few of them had been able to resist the temptation to walk with a mincing gait and make lisping demands for peeled grapes and depilated virgins, and Mal had let them have their fun, even though by rights she should have reported them for gross impertinence. Mocking a priest was nearly as bad as impersonating one, and the penalty might not be as severe but you and your kin would still regret it — at least a dozen of your relatives would have a hand lopped off, and you yourself would lose both hands and a foot as well. Like the old joke went: I called a priest an idiot then hopped it.

And it had paid off. The Conquistador was now surrounded and heavily outnumbered by some of the best swordsmen on the force.

He managed to recover from his dumbstruck stupor in time. As the first of the Jaguars attacked, up came his rapier. Blades clashed. The fight was on.

Mal turned to Aaronson, seated beside her.

“Come on. Let’s get in there.”

“What?” said her DS. “Have you gone mad? Twenty of them, one of him. They don’t need our help.”

“Maybe not, but he’s my fucking collar. I’m not letting someone else hog the glory. Whoever kills him, the body is still mine and I’ll gut the man who tries to take it off me.”

“You know, boss,” Aaronson said, getting to his feet, “you scare me sometimes.”

“Good.”

The one advantage the Conquistador had over his opponents was that he was fully armoured and they were not. Their garb was the standard plainclothes wear for a priest, a light alpaca wool suit over a multicoloured brocade waistcoat which echoed the much fancier garment used for ceremonies. Underneath their shirts, many of the Jaguar Warriors had taken the precaution of donning stab-proof vests, but that still left their heads and limbs unprotected. It was a vulnerability the Conquistador was quick to exploit.

The tall Jaguar, Constable Carey, died first. The Conquistador ducked inside his guard and ran him through the groin. He yanked the rapier out just in time to counter a macuahitl slash from the left. Grabbing the Jaguar’s sword arm, he opened his neck from ear to ear. As the man went down, he twisted the macuahitl out of his grasp.

Now, armed on both sides, he met the onslaught of the next two Jaguars, matching them blow for blow. The two of them flanked him at the platform’s edge. The Conquistador feinted forwards, then leapt backwards, off the platform. Both Jaguars lunged at him at the same time and were wrongfooted. They stared down in astonishment to find each other’s swords embedded in their thighs, and collapsed against each other like a pair of broken bookends.

Down in the area between the seating and the stage front, the Conquistador discarded the borrowed macuahitl and drew his pistol. With three shots he eviscerated the nearest three Jaguar Warriors. Even a stab-proof vest was no protection against a high-velocity cluster of flechettes.

Another Jaguar, however, got close enough to knock the pistol out of his hand before he could inflict any more damage with it. In retaliation, the Conquistador sliced through the man’s arm with his rapier, severing the limb at the elbow.

At that point it became clear that the Conquistador was cornered. His back was against the stage. Several very angry and determined Jaguars were closing in on him.

All at once they rushed him. Obsidian blades hammered at his armour from all directions, seeking chinks. Someone with a sense of irony might have seen the very image of what he had described onstage a moment ago, Britain embattled on all sides, a lonely island beleaguered by the might of the Empire.

He fought back gamely, but the Jaguar Warriors were giving him no quarter. Mal, at the rear of the pack, was convinced it would be only moments before a crippling sword stroke got through, maybe a fatal one. She allowed herself a quick gloat. She had done it. She had succeeded where all the previous investigating officers had not. She had pulled off a feat most would have thought impossible. The Conquistador was about to become an ugly footnote in modern British history, not to mention a significant feather in her cap. Nobody would forget tonight. This was the kind of achievement that future chief superintendents were made of.

And to think that a week ago she had been contemplating quitting the force.

A week was a long time in policing. Maybe all she’d needed was this — the opportunity to do something worthwhile with the job, the chance to feel like she was helping society rather than simply serving the state.

The pommel of a macuahitl pounded down on the Conquistador’s helmet. He fell.

Yes!

It was then, as Mal was enjoying a surge of triumph, that everything turned to shit.

One of the Jaguar Warriors masquerading as priests suddenly grabbed his neck. His eyes rolled up, his knees buckled, and he crumpled to the ground.

A hoarse shout came from the trees surrounding the amphitheatre, giving an order in a language Mal didn’t recognise. Then men came leaping down from the branches onto the topmost seats.

They hurtled down the raked rows, uttering battle cries as they ran. They were small and dark-haired, and their faces were daubed with white warpaint so as to resemble, more than anything, skulls. Their clothing mixed combat fatigues with chunky jewellery, and some of them whirled bolases above their heads while others brandished blowpipes. Everyone was startled by their unexpected appearance, and none more so than Mal.

The Jaguar Warriors turned as a volley of blowpipe darts came whipping towards them. Wherever a dart scored a hit, the man fell immediately and lay prostrate on the ground, motionless as a waxwork. The remaining, unscathed Jaguars threw themselves at the new arrivals. Linked trios of bolas balls helicoptered through the air, catching them around their necks and legs. They toppled, and as they sprawled flat out, yet more blowpipe darts rendered them inert and insensible.

They’re hunting us, Mal thought. Bringing us down like animals on the pampas plains.

One of the skull-faced attackers ran at her, bolas spinning. Before he could launch it, she narrowed the distance between them and spiked her macuahitl at him. His momentum drove him straight onto the blade, impaling him up to the hilt.

As Mal heaved the sword out, another of the skull-faces sprang. This one wasn’t taking any chances. His blowpipe was already at his lips. The range was point blank. Mal swung her sword anyway, hoping against hope that she could get him before he sent the dart on its way.

His cheeks inflated, and at the very same instant Aaronson jumped at him with a frantic cry of “No!” There was a phoooft! and Aaronson yelped. He and the skull-face tumbled to the ground together in a heap.

Mal pounced on the two tangled bodies, thrusting the point of her macuahitl down into the skull-face’s eye and piercing him to the brain.

“Aaronson! Talk to me. Are you okay?”

She turned him over. He moaned. His eyes rolled in their sockets. His limbs were floppy, rubbery. Was he dying or simply lapsing into unconsciousness? Was the poison on the dart’s tip fatal or just a powerful paralytic?

Either way, there was nothing she could do for him right now. She rose, scanning around. The attackers had cleared a path through to the Conquistador. They were after her villain. Well, they weren’t bloody well having him.

She sprinted towards him, leaping over the bodies of downed comrades. The Conquistador looked stunned and exhausted. The skull-faces were helping him to his feet. He didn’t seem to know who they were, but was plainly relieved that they had intervened.

Mal was just yards from him when a rotund individual stepped into her way. His warpaint was the most detailed of all of them, savage and snarly. Yet his eyes were weirdly compassionate. He looked almost sorry as he loosed off his bolas at her.

She tried to duck, but wasn’t fast enough. The bolas cords twined around her head, tightening in an instant. There was a triple impact, a triple burst of lightning and thunder.

Then darkness.