Aztec Century

Epilogue

In my dreams, I dreamt of Aztecs, lighting New Fires on mountain tops to celebrate the rebirth of the world, offering human hearts in sacrifice to the sun, aloft in huge solar fleets which flew over vast uncharted landscapes, hungry for conquest.

I dreamt vividly, and at great length.

I remember waking, yet not waking, because my eyes were still closed. I couldn’t move or speak. An Aztec-accented voice was talking in persuasive, hypnotic tones, telling me that Victoria and I had been taken to another Earth, where we were unknown and would lead a simple life of anonymity. All the essentials had been provided for us: a place to live, new identities, a fixed income which would allow us to survive with a modicum of comfort. We were banished utterly, with no hope of returning to our old world. There would be no contact with it, nothing.

The voice was quietly insistent, and I was in a receptive, accepting state of mind. I listened calmly and carefully, absorbing everything. At length the voice fell silent, and I sank back down into sleep again.

When I next awoke, it was to a bright morning. I was lying in a bed in an eggshell green room, flower-patterned curtains drawn back at the window.

I sat up sharply, feeling fragile and brittle but very clearheaded. The room was warm, though a veil of condensation hung on the lower pane of the window. Victoria lay asleep in a bed next to mine.

I rose and went over to her. She was breathing slowly and regularly, her face tranquil.

A cream towelling robe hung on the back of the door. It fitted perfectly. I turned the tortoiseshell handle of the door, opened it very slowly.

A narrow landing gave access to a bathroom and a second bedroom. Both had a newly decorated look, and they had not been used. Very gingerly, I descended the stone stairway.

Downstairs was a furnished living room with a television and a Welsh dresser stacked with crockery. There was a book-lined study, and a new fitted kitchen with oak-panelled cupboards and a wall-clock that said eight twenty. A pristine water boiler thrummed and swished high on one wall.

The windows looked out across a valley which I immediately knew to be the same one where we had spent our years in hiding. And yet it was not the same: where the Ty Trist colliery had stood were flat-topped landscaped mounds, one of them with a football pitch on top.

Cautiously I opened the door and went outside into a neglected garden whose lawn had, nevertheless, recently been mown. The valley was the same yet different, trees and fields wrongly placed, all the contours of the land subtly or starkly changed. A car passed by on the road which wound up the valley to Tredegar – a petrol-driven car of a design that looked old-fashioned to my eyes. Farms, houses, even the russet stretches of bracken – they were not as I remembered them.

Though the sun was shining, the spring air was chill. I went back inside, opening the kitchen cupboards and finding them stocked with food. I inspected the cartons and tins and jars. Their labels were unfamiliar to me, though they looked just like products that might have existed in my own world. The fridge hummed away in one corner, eggs and several cartons of UHT milk inside. There were two sliced loaves in the freezer, another one in the breadbin. I squeezed it; it was fresh.

The whole place was spotless, and yet it had an unoccupied feel, as if we were newly arrived. I plugged the television into its primitive socket and switched it on. Two presenters, a man and a woman, were talking to a British movie star whom I had never seen or heard of before. Then there was a brief report about a phenomenon called the Greenhouse Effect. A plump, smiling man came on screen with astrological forecasts. Then a relentlessly jovial woman began doing exercises.

On the wall above the fireplace was a print of an oil painting showing a vase of sunflowers.

I heard Victoria scream.

I raced upstairs and found her cowering in the corner of her bed, knees up to her chest, bedclothes drawn around her. She looked terrified. I went to her and she clung tightly to me, whimpering uncontrollably and making inarticulate sounds.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, feeling as if I was living a dream.

I began to stroke her hair while she trembled in my arms. For a long time I did nothing else. I thought then that she was merely suffering a shock reaction to the strangeness of her surroundings and all the terrors which had preceded it. I thought that she would eventually calm down and that we would be able to talk about what happened, to draw comfort and reassurance from one another, to face our bizarre new circumstances together. But I was wrong. Downstairs, the television blared unfamiliar theme music and advertisements for products I felt I should have known, yet didn’t. When at length Victoria seemed calm enough to speak, when I raised her head from my breast, it was damp with the saliva which had been drooling from her mouth. She gazed at me with eyes that had hugely dilated pupils. There was nothing behind them.

Victoria was broken, her mind finally destroyed by what had been done to Alex. I realized this when she emptied her bladder on the bed and had to be led into the bathroom and undressed like a child. After that first shock reaction, she became docile, but, though I tried, I could not get her to utter a single word. She watched my mouth as I spoke, as a young baby might, but never reacted to what I was saying. I didn’t even know if she understood me.

There was soap and fresh towels in the bathroom. The wardrobes were stocked with clean sheets and clothing for both of us, well-tailored but undemonstrative fashions, manufactured in London, Paris and Milan rather than Amecameca or Potomac or Shanghai. The brand names were entirely unfamiliar.

I got Victoria downstairs and sat her in an armchair. The cottage was centrally heated, but I wrapped a blanket around her for extra comfort. I was extremely hungry, and presumed that she was too, though she gave no sign. But before I set to preparing us a meal, I quickly scouted the spacious surroundings of the cottage, looking for any lurking figures, hoping to find whoever had brought us here hovering nearby, keeping us under surveillance. The cottage stood alone, surrounded by fields, with a terrace of houses and a redbrick school on the hillside above us. There was no one in sight.

I heated some tomato soup, then opened a can of curried vegetables, which we ate with rice. Since arriving here I haven’t eaten meat or served it to Victoria. I remember only too well our final supper, and I think of Alex, and of the pre-Christian Aztec ceremonial rite which reputedly included the eating of the flesh of the sacrificial victim. Human flesh is said to resemble pork in flavour, and rich sauces make many meats indistinguishable from one another. It does not bear dwelling on.

Victoria was ravenous, gulping her soup and ripping slices of bread apart to cram into her mouth. I continued to feel a kind of inner brightness and stillness which I suspected were the aftereffects of whatever drugs had been fed to us in our last meal. The Aztecs were expert in the use of hallucinogenics, and it would have been easy for them to incorporate fungi and other narcotic plants into the dishes we had eaten – peyotl, probably, and ololiuhqui, and the sacred fungus teonanacatl. No doubt there were others, carefully chosen to keep us stupefied yet distracted with visions. I found it impossible to separate what had really happened from what were products of my own drugged imaginings. Everything I could remember seemed slightly unreal.

For the first three days I did nothing except remain in the cottage with Victoria, learning to care for her and attempting to get my bearings. Victoria required little attention except at mealtimes; she soon learned how to use the bathroom, to wash and dress herself, and she sat contentedly in front of the television for hours, watching whatever programmes were showing with a faint, vacant smile. Though she began to respond to me and seemed to understand simple instructions, she never spoke.

The study held a wall of books, some old, some new. There was an atlas and a gazetteer, guides to South Wales and Gwent, a one-volume history of the world, big coffee-table books on literature, the cinema and popular art. And, of course, there were titles on Mexico and the Aztecs, at least two dozen of them. These, and the sunflower painting, were not-so-subtle forms of Aztec mockery, I was certain. The painting, famous in this world, I later discovered, was unknown in mine.

I scouted the area around the cottage whenever I was able, avoiding contact with the locals. One of the guidebooks told me that the terrace of houses was the village of Troedrhiwgair, again unknown in my world. The people were Welsh, but English-speaking, dressed in a recognizable style of clothing, while the television revealed the manners and mores and means of speaking in this Britain as no different from the one I had left.

It was March here, as on our world, and I was able to calculate that two days had passed between Extepan’s coronation and my waking up in the cottage. Two whole days of nothing except the sound of the Aztec voice in my waking sleep, telling me what I could expect. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the actuality.

It rained for the rest of the week, and I spent much of my time sitting with Victoria, watching news reports and current affairs programmes, perusing book after book, studying their illustrations and photographs minutely, fascinated and dislocated by every fact, small or large, which forced me to accept that we had indeed been cast adrift on a different Earth.

And how different! How mundanely yet stunningly different. Its landscapes and histories echo my own, there are places and names and people which are familiar; yet nothing is quite the same. It is as if our destinies are separate but linked, like ghost reflections of one another, so that some people and places are famous in both – often for different reasons – others not at all. Of course, I was startled to discover that here the Aztecs are but a memory, their nascent empire destroyed by the very man who set them on the path to future greatness in my world. There is a British royal family that stems from a line of the ruling house extinguished on my Earth. Here, my great-grandfather was never born and our house at Marlborough does not exist I feel like a ghost. What could be more cruel than to inhabit a world which knows nothing of you? Extepan chose his revenge well.

There were days, especially early on, when I believed my knowledge that I was but a fiction would drive me into the same kind of madness as Victoria. Imagine, just try to imagine, living in a world that seems an invention, a parody of reality. It’s little wonder that I have become intensely mistrustful to the point of paranoia and seldom like leaving the cottage. Even less do I like having to meet people, however ordinary-looking or prosaic their concerns. A chance encounter fills me with dread; a simple ‘Good morning’ is enough to make me want to flee for fear that I might be forced into a conversation that will swiftly reveal the depths of my ignorance of this world, exposing me as a fake, an intruder, an anomaly. What could be worse than living in a place where every mundanity is an attack on memory and belief, a threat to one’s already fragile sense of self?

Yet if I thought that oblivion in this world was punishment enough, I did not realize that Extepan had reserved the subtlest cruelty for last. At the end of the first week, a maroon van came jolting down the rutted driveway to the cottage. Stomach churning with anxiety, I rushed outside as it pulled up. A man got out and smiled at me.

I went immobile with shock.

I watched him walk around to the back of the van, open the door and remove a large cardboard box filled with groceries.

It was Bevan.

He wasn’t the Bevan of my world, I knew that immediately, because he was slimmer, balder, and wore a greying beard. He carried himself differently, was less slovenly dressed, wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt, the kind of clothing which my Bevan had never favoured. But their faces were the same – the prominent jaw and ears, the small mouth – and they were the same age. They could have been twins.

He brought the box up to me, still smiling.

‘Not a bad morning, is it? They said you wanted this.’

The smile was more open, less devious, than the one I knew. He wasn’t the same man, yet it was him, it was him.

‘You’re down for weekly deliveries, that’s right, isn’t it?’

I made to speak, but first had to clear my throat.

‘Who arranged this?’

He looked a little put-out. ‘Got a call from a bloke in London, didn’t I? He said you and your sister had just moved in and wanted a regular delivery. Run the local store I do, see.’

Again I found it hard to speak, and even harder to think clearly.

‘Did they say who they were?’

Now he was distinctly unsure of me. ‘Someone from your bank, it was. They’ve opened an account for you with me, so it’s all paid for. All right, is it?’

I looked at the box. It held bread, milk, tinned goods and washing powder. It was hard not to stare at him.

‘There’s another one in the back of the van,’ he said. ‘Where’d you want me to put it?’

I was still numb. ‘In the kitchen,’ I said, moving aside, indicating. ‘It’s in there.’

I followed him inside. He put the box down, then went out again, but not before saying, ‘Bit of rain we’ve been having.’

I couldn’t answer. He returned promptly with a second box, holding fresh vegetables and fruit.

Victoria was still asleep upstairs, and I was grateful, in case the sight of him sent her into another screaming frenzy. Everything about his manner suggested he was entirely innocent of who we really were and where we had come from, but his very appearance had thrown me into the throes of suspicion and unease. I wanted him to be gone, but at the same time I needed to find out what he knew.

‘You said it was paid for,’ I remarked.

He nodded blithely. ‘There’s an account at the local branch. They said you din’t want any fuss. Sister’s not well, is she?’

My suspicions redoubled. ‘Who told you that?’

He was peering around the kitchen. ‘Man who phoned. Mentioned that she’d had a breakdown, poor dab, and that you’d come here so she could convalesce. Nice and peaceful spot, isn’t it?’

‘Did he tell you who we were?’

Off-handedly he said, ‘Sisters from London. Got a bit of money behind you, have you?’

‘Who said that?’

He obviously found me strange, and perhaps was trying to be casual in response.

‘I just assumed. With neither of you working, like.’

Was this simple inquisitiveness? Or an echo of the other Bevan’s insolence? Did he really know something?

‘Was there someone living here before us?’ I asked.

‘Headmaster of the school,’ he said, obviously referring to the one above us on the hill. ‘He moved to Newport when it shut down. It’s been empty this past year or more. Pleasant spot, I reckon, with the river close by and no one to bother you.’ He sucked on his teeth. ‘Well, I’d best be going. See you in a week. If there’s anything extra you need, the number’s in the book. It’s the Gwalia Stores in town. Castle Street, up by the town clock. You can’t miss it.’

I followed him out to the door. He climbed into the van and started the engine. I had the impression he was eager to be going.

The driver’s window was open. I went up to it as he revved the engine.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, a tremor in my voice.

But he was already pulling away.

Five months have passed since we first arrived here, and all my efforts to discover some firm evidence of our former lives have failed. Even if I had been so inclined, it would have proved difficult to travel widely because Victoria becomes agitated if we are away from the cottage for any length of time; and I share her tendency to want to huddle there.

Despite this, I did make several forays at first, forcing Victoria to accompany me to Tredegar, where the Gwalia Stores indeed exist. I watched Bevan serving customers inside but did not enter myself. Of course, I’m not certain his name is Bevan because the store front gives no proprietor and I’m afraid to ask any of the locals. I’m afraid to ask them in case they confirm it, or in case they don’t. Somehow uncertainty seems preferable, though I can’t rationally explain why. I refused even to consult the telephone directory, which might not, in any case, be conclusive. Bevan is a common name in this part of the world, a legacy of the English conquest of Wales, as on my Earth.

On that same visit, I steeled myself to go into the local bank, where it was confirmed that an account had indeed been opened in my name – Catherine Marlborough, the family name my great-grandfather adopted when he ascended the throne. Moneys from a trust fund would pay a net annual income of fifteen thousand pounds a year – more than enough to live on. Why such generosity? I wondered. It would have been far easier, and more cruel, for Extepan to have dumped us here penniless. Was it in deference to our former status? Or was he not yet finished with us?

It was difficult to establish the facts behind the trust fund without revealing my utter ignorance and thus arousing suspicion, but eventually I was allowed to speak by telephone to someone from the parent bank in London. He sounded businesslike and very English, and gave every impression of knowing nothing about the Aztecs, of being no part in any duplicity on their behalf. By a tortuous process involving equal measures of dissembling and strategic absent-mindedness, I was able to establish that Victoria and I were supposedly the daughters of a diplomat who had been lost, with his wife, in an aircraft which had disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico – my heart quailed at this – two years before. Victoria was ill through a shock reaction to their deaths, but arrangements had been made in my father’s will to provide for us. We had lived much of our lives in the Americas, and had no friends or relatives here.

I did not press the matter. No doubt all the relevant documentation existed, expertly faked and on file. Presumably the Aztecs had been sending their agents into this world for long enough to have built up impeccable identities as well as funds to support their operations. It was possible their agents in London would be British citizens from my world, collaborators with the Aztec Empire who could move with complete confidence through this Britain.

Not a day passed when I didn’t look, in my surroundings or in newspapers and television programmes, for evidence of Aztec infiltration. I was certain someone from that world would have been put close by to watch over us. But I could never pinpoint anything. My suspicions tended to focus more and more on our new Bevan, a true native of this world, I was sure, but too much the alter ego of his enigmatic and elusive counterpart. Perhaps this Bevan had been recruited by the other one, was serving masters in my world. He called every week with our groceries, and while there was never anything in his manner to suggest this, his very presence and continual off-hand curiosity about us suggested a link. He was the only person I could identify directly with my own world, no matter that he differed from his progenitor. There were times when I wanted to ask him outright, but I could never muster the courage. I was torn between the need to know the truth and a fear of reopening terrible wounds. Victoria, for her part, showed absolutely no reaction when they finally encountered one another. Either something in her flatly refused to recognize him, or the abominations which had wiped away her sanity had also erased all memory of our past life.

So I vacillated, until one day I decided that there might be another means of confirming the truth. One Saturday, with a nervous Victoria in tow, I took a train to Paddington, and from there we travelled by Underground and suburban railway to Crystal Palace. I already knew that the palace in this world had been destroyed by fire decades before our own, but I had not come for that. I led Victoria through the park, down the hill towards the lake where the Quetzalcoatl structure had stood. On our world, it was the staging point for a tunnel into this one. And every entrance has an exit.

As we approached, I heard rhythmic percussive music. It was evening, and a small crowd was sitting on the big grassy bowl fronting the lake, watching a steel band play on a stage which had been built over it.

Behind the stage, there was only a chalet-like building with a black felt roof, too small to house any kind of secret installation. How could this be? Did the tunnel only generate its exit when it was activated? Or did the infiltrators from my world simply blink into existence in this one after transference? But that would allow them no means of getting back, whereas Extepan had told me Aztec agents regularly returned after their explorations.

The building was a drab municipal structure, used for storage and fenced off. I searched the surroundings thoroughly, rooting in the leaf litter under sycamore and holly trees for the smallest piece of evidence, an artefact or item inadvertently dropped, something disposable carelessly thrown away – a cigarette butt, a tzictli wrapper, a button or ring or footprint which indisputably came from my Aztec world. Anything would have convinced me. But there was nothing.

Victoria was agitated with the noise of the steel band, unsettled by the disruption and strangeness of London. It was growing dark, and I knew I had to get her home to the cottage that same day. I made one last desperate reconnoitre.

Nothing.

The fruitless visit to London undermined my confidence more than I first imagined. As the weeks turned into months and I remained ensconced in the cottage with Victoria, so our past lives seemed to me to become more like a dream, a mere figment of my own imaginings, while this world pressed its claims as the only true reality simply because we had to live in it day by day, to accept its domesticities and the sheer weight of its own normalcy. I think the aftereffects of the Aztec drugs intensified this impression, distancing me from my memories, making them seem surreal.

Perhaps that’s why I decided to write this account, to try to restore their legitimacy. Yet sometimes I wonder whether it may have the reverse effect, whether to put things down in words, make a story of them, is to make them fiction. Sometimes I imagine the Bevan of this world as a true innocent. I imagine him coming upon these pages and reading them. What would he think? That they were the deluded ramblings of a lonely woman who has to care for a debilitated sister in a part of the country where she knows no one? That I wrote them as a fantasy to divert and deliver myself from the drab realities of everyday existence? That I am, myself, mad?

Yet I hold to my beliefs, despite my growing doubts. I have to. And there are small victories, affirmations of the past which I cling to. A few days ago, while rummaging in the dressing-table drawer, I came upon a necklace secreted at the back. A bead necklace of jade and obsidian. Extepan’s betrothal gift to me.

Every evening, when my work is done and Victoria is safely in bed, I go to the window and stare down the valley. I watch and wait. Extepan hasn’t finished with us yet, I’m certain of that, otherwise he wouldn’t have provided for us. He wouldn’t have put us here, in this place, he wouldn’t have left the necklace as a remembrance, he wouldn’t have arranged for this other Bevan to be on hand. He hasn’t finished with us because he’s scarcely started with this world. The Aztecs now rule mine, but they live by conquest. I know it’s only a matter of time before they build tunnels big enough to send whole armies through, tunnels which will enable them to extend their empire by conquering another world. Here, things are different, and they will find armies aplenty to test their mettle. But none, ultimately, to resist them. In the end, their onslaught will be irresistible.

I don’t know when it will come, but I’m certain it shall. So I sit at the window each evening, turning the necklace in my hands, looking down the valley while Victoria sleeps and the house lies silent around me. I search the skies for points of light which will tell me that at last it has begun, at last it has begun again.

They will come in their shining ships to conquer and destroy, barbarians of gold and feathers and serpents of fire. There are days when I firmly believe this, days when I consider it an absurd delusion. Every evening I watch and wait with fear and longing.