Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

A MASK OF FLESH by Marie Brennan

Sitting alone in the green heat of the forest, far from the road and any observing eyes, Neniza began to craft her mask of flesh.

She started with her toes, for the face would be the hardest part. Toes, feet, legs; the gentle curve of hips. She would have dearly loved to shape for herself the slender, delicate body of an amantecatl, but it would never work. Oh, she could take the form easily enough, but the amanteca were not common caste, and she could never hope to mimic the ways of court folk well enough to pass. Instead she crafted the petite, pretty figure of a young alux peasant. Someone innocent of city ways. Someone who could catch the eye of the lord.

Her father had taught her this work, their art, after her horrified mother saw what she had birthed and left it in the woods. He wished she were still a son, Neniza knew, wished she had not changed into a daughter. Daughters were dangerous things. But his own words had done it, telling the story of what happened to their people. Waking the anger in her. The priests spoke of the wet season and the dry season, the season of giving and the season of taking. For her people, it was no mere abstraction. Their bodies reflected their souls.

Perhaps her father could overlook the wrong they had suffered; Neniza could not. She had not told him where she was going, what she intended to do. He believed they should stay out of sight, accept the hidden existence left to them—never mind that he himself went to town all too often, to court the women of other castes, perhaps to sire more children for them to fear. It was all right for him.

But not for her. Not so long as she remained female. She was too dangerous.

That means I’m powerful, Neniza thought, and began to work on her face.

She made it a young one, and attractive, wondering as she did so if it looked anything like her mother. Her father would never say. Neniza had nothing to know her by, no way to pick her mother out of the countless aluxob working the fields, and if she were to go to town without her mask of flesh, her mother would never acknowledge a thing like her as offspring. Every time she made an alux face, she told herself it was her mother’s, and every time it was different.

Bushy, soft hair above a round and cheerful face, with eyes the fresh green of new corn. The mask was complete, but Neniza hesitated. Her father would warn her against this, if he knew.

Her father had proved his weakness many times over.

Neniza pulled clothes on over the fleshy nakedness of her body, loincloth, skirt, and a shawl broad enough to hide her arms, then forced her way through the trees to the road.

The city almost made her turn back.

Neniza had been to town before, disguising herself as a woman of one common caste or another, mingling into the crowds she found there, but her first sight of the city showed her how little that had prepared her.

The huge stone walls took her breath away, towering upward in interlocking blocks of carefully-dressed limestone. The tangle of forest had been cleared in a broad swath around them, so the sun hammered down on the line of aluxob with their grain and vay sotz with their packs of goods to trade, all waiting to pass through the gates. Neniza joined them, thirsty and footsore; she was unused to walking barefoot and masked on the hard, pounded dirt of the road. A few of the other travelers glanced at her incuriously, but most disregarded her, intent on their destination. She was grateful for their inattention.

Inside the walls she found a clamoring chaos that took the breath right out of her lungs. Smells, sights, sounds, people pushing at her on every side, dogs underfoot, jostling elbows, flapping birds tethered or in cages, sellers shouting, strangers of every caste packed in like ants, and over it all, rearing above the flat level of streets and houses, the imposing heights of the temple and palace mounds.

Neniza stared upward, transfixed, and then stumbled and nearly fell when a passing kisin rammed into her. He continued on without apologizing, while the flow of people buffeted her this way and that, until she lurched up against the mud-brick wall of a potter’s shop and stopped to catch her breath.

She could no longer see the palace mound from where she stood, and it was probably just as well. With her goal not dominating her vision, she could calm herself, take slow breaths, reassert her self-control before she ventured back out into the stream of people flowing through the lanes and plazas of the city. They wore shawls and serapes woven in many colors, with beaded fringes of carved wood or even coral, that would have been unimaginable wealth in the villages she knew. It was too much for Neniza to take in. She flinched every time someone brushed up against her, which was often. Never before had she put her mask to such a test, and it was hard to trust that it would hold.

No one gave her a second glance, though. Why should anyone pay attention to a young alux woman, lost in the mass of people swarming through the city streets?

By the time she arrived at the foot of the palace mound, she was breathless and faint, and for the first time she experienced doubt. This was no place for her. She belonged out in the trackless expanses of forest, where the fields and towns had not yet pushed the wilderness back. She belonged in solitude, away from contact with others except when she chose to bring herself near them. She was meant to deal with people singly, not in flocks.

Alone at the base of the mound—for the people of the city did not come here unless they had reason—she bit her lip and looked upward.

The wide steps of dressed limestone led up, and up, and up. The arched entrance to the expanse of the palace mound faced westward, opposite to the main temple, so that the setting sun scorched its carved facade with scarlet light. Two figures stood on either side of the arch; she could not see them clearly at this distance, but their muscled outlines and the spears in their hands marked them as guards. Once past them—if she passed them—she was committed. Or so she told herself. Once she attained the heights of the palace mound, she would not turn back.

Neniza took a deep breath, wiped her sweating brow, and began to climb the steps.

The guards did not move as she climbed past the carved and painted murals of the lord’s triumphs against his enemies, but the instant her foot touched the level surface of the smaller landing just below them, their spears snapped across to bar the arch.

Neniza jumped at the movement, even though she had been expecting it. The guards, of course, were ocelotlaca, and she had never been so close to such before. They stood half again as tall as her small alux form, and their muscles slid smoothly beneath the jaguar spots of their fur. They wore loincloths, arm-bands, headdresses of beads and shells; nothing stood between them and harm but their own teeth, claws, and weapons, their skill in battle.

They needed nothing more.

“State your business,” a melodiously bored voice said in accented Wide Speech. Within the shade of the archway, just behind the spears, stood an amantecatl. He was dressed in elegant court finery, with golden ear-spools and a pectoral of turquoise and jade. Still, Neniza told herself, he must not be very important, if he were assigned the tedious duty of the palace entrance.

She slid her hands beneath the opposite edges of her shawl, crossing her arms and bowing as she knelt on the hot stone. “I have come to wait in the plaza of the Honored One, in hopes that he will listen to my words.”

The amantecatl sighed. “You’re going to wait a long time.”

Neniza nodded, eyes fixed on a near-invisible seam where two blocks of limestone joined together. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” the amantecatl said, and then muttered something in unintelligible Court Speech. “But you may enter, if you wish to waste your time.”

A wooden clack as the ocelotlaca tapped their spears together and withdrew them. Neniza rose, bowed again, and hurried through the arch into the plaza behind.

They had grown careless. They believed the threat was long gone. They had not demanded to see her hands.

The amantecatl’s words were true. Neniza lost count of how many days she spent waiting in the petitioners’ plaza. She knew only how difficult it was to keep her nature disguised, living so closely with others.

She did not need food, but she had to hide her lack of need, and water was a constant concern. Others ran out of provisions but would not leave; they traded sexual favors to the palace-mound inhabitants who came by the plaza, in exchange for what they needed. It was one of the many sacrifices that kept the world functioning. But Neniza, female as she had become, dared not imitate them.

Nor could she maintain the mask forever. Her first task, upon reaching the plaza, was to find an alcove sufficiently sheltered for her to hide in when she felt her flesh failing. The plaza was ringed by buildings, and the petitioners went among them, but privacy was hard to come by.

Still, she endured. She had climbed the palace mound and passed the guards; that meant she could not turn back.

Life in the petitioners’ plaza was not a simple matter of waiting. However long Neniza had been there, others had waited longer, arriving after the last visit the lord had made to this place. There were even a few desperate souls who had been there when he came, but had not received the gift of his attention; they stayed on in the fading hope that their fortunes might improve. They were few in number, though. Most who were not heard the first time lacked the determination to go on waiting.

In the plaza, Neniza saw people of every caste. Hairy kisin, owl-eyed chusas, vay sotz with gifts they hoped to give the lord, and at least a dozen aluxob, whose company Neniza avoided. Even some of the noble castes were there, startling her with their presence. Over time she came to understand that not all amanteca and ocelotlaca had courtly rank, that some of their kind had fallen out of favor to the point where they made their way in the cities as commoners, selling their skills to others.

People of every caste except her own.

There were none left in this domain, save Neniza and her father. Still, she found herself searching, looking at the hands of everyone in the plaza, until the day she realized that she was hoping to find another, hoping to convince herself that she did not need to be here. It was a desire born of weakness, and so she dug it ruthlessly out of her heart and cast it away. She would not be like her father, and let what had happened pass without consequence.

So she waited, hiding beneath her mask, until her luck finally changed.

“All kneel! All kneel! Kneel before the Master of the House of the Dawn!”

The voice rang out over the petitioners’ plaza from the balcony that overlooked it. Neniza glanced up long enough to catch sight of several amanteca, draped in glorious feathered robes and gold jewelry. One, standing forward of the rest, was serving as herald. This much she saw; then, like everyone else, Neniza threw herself to the ground, prostrating herself on the hot stone.

Everything fell silent as the last person grew still. In the hush, they could all hear the measured steps above. The lord of the land had come at last.

The amantecatl spoke again. “Today is not a day for petitions.”

What? Neniza thought, and heard someone near her sob once before stifling himself.

“The Revered Lord has come for another purpose,” the amantecatl went on. “Four dawns from now begins the feast of the Flayed God, on the day Thirteen Leaf. On this great festival depend our hopes of fertile fields, the growth of the corn which feeds us all. The Elevated One has come here today to seek a maiden to serve as the Rain Bride. The woman so honored will be guaranteed a place in the highest heaven, and the petition she brought with her to this place will be granted. Remain as you are, and he will choose from among you.”

Neniza’s mind raced as she heard footsteps descending to the plaza. More than one set; of course the lord would not come down here himself. It would be the amanteca, searching among the petitioners for suitable candidates.

She was suitable.

And if they chose her….

She could wait for another day, but there was no guarantee the lord would ever hear her petition, let alone grant it. This would bypass uncertainty entirely—but at a price.

I knew what I risked, coming here, Neniza thought, trembling with excitement and fear. I always knew.

She prayed silently as the footsteps ranged up and down the plaza. People said of her kind that they could manipulate others, driving them to think with passion instead of reason. Even Neniza didn’t know if it was true. Her father would never answer when she asked—afraid, perhaps, of what she might do with it as a daughter. If it were possible, she had no idea how. But she prayed, as if her thoughts could reach the minds of the amanteca searching the plaza. Choose me, choose me, choose me….

One set of feet stopped not far away. Neniza ceased to breathe.

A rustle of feathered robe, as if the amantecatl were gesturing. From above, a soft, sibilant response in Court Speech, and Neniza’s skin tingled at the sound of the lord’s voice.

“Maiden,” the amantecatl said, “the lord favors you.”

Neniza risked the tiniest shift of her head. And she saw that the amantecatl was gesturing, not at her, but at a young alux woman less than a pace in front of her.

No. This may be my only chance.

“I beg your forgiveness for my presumption.”

The words came out before Neniza could even decide whether to speak or stay silent. All around her, she felt others jerk in horror; they would have edged away, had they not feared to move. As well they might. Neniza would have taken back the words, but she could not; there was nothing to do but speak on.

She lifted her head just enough to speak clearly. To look up would only ensure her death, with the lord standing above. “I beg your mercy. But the woman you have chosen is no maiden.”

It was true. Like many others in the plaza, the alux had lain with men in exchange for food and water. How much it truly mattered, Neniza couldn’t say—surely they’d chosen wrongly before; was that what caused the drought years?—but having heard it so publicly, the nobles could not ignore her words. Everyone here knew the alux was no virgin, and to choose her knowingly would be to undermine their faith in the festival.

Dead silence had followed on her words. Neniza’s muscles ached with tension as she waited. Then a chiming rustle as the amantecatl stepped over the prostrate body of the alux he had been considering.

“Are you a maiden?”

“Yes,” Neniza said. Possibly the only one here.

The amantecatl said something in Court Speech, not to her. A pause, and then the lord responded again. Was he angry? Amused? Neniza strove to read past the alien, unfamiliar facade of his words, to the mind behind it. She might have just killed herself, and achieved nothing in doing so.

“Very well,” the amantecatl said. “You will become the Rain Bride.”

She wondered, in the four days that followed, whether the alux whose position she’d taken hated her. The lord’s gift to the Rain Bride, the granting of her petition, meant nothing to Neniza now. She would get what she wanted regardless. The alux might have lost her only chance. But petitioners went home again, once they had spoken or given up, and Neniza knew she herself would not. One always made sacrifices, one way or another.

Her status meant she was treated well, even lavishly. It almost became a problem. They brought her delicacies to eat, and she had to find a way to dispose of them without suspicion—not the peccary meat that villagers might eat in the wet season when food was abundant, but jaguar and eagle, the noblest animals of earth and air. For drink she had delicate wines of honey and fruit; her experience with them was limited, and the first night she drank rather too much. But she maintained her mask, and no one suspected.

Before dawn on the final day, an escort of eight ocelotlaca woke her and took her to be bathed.

Low-ranking amanteca had the job of preparing her. Neniza feigned blushing modesty and managed to wash herself, so that no one would examine her too closely. The higher-ranking artisan who took over once she was clean focused on things other than her hands, painting her breasts and belly and groin, draping her in “clothing” that was nothing more than sweetly chiming jewelry, dressing the soft bush of her hair with hibiscus flowers. The blossoms were an unexpected sign of the wealth and power that surrounded Neniza, for they did not bloom in the dry season, and the rains, of course, had not yet begun.

They prepared her, and Neniza curled her hands into fists to hide them from casual eyes. Let them think her nervous. I am not afraid.

The procession was dizzying. Her escort carried her palanquin, while twenty more ocelotlaca formed a solid wall that kept the crowd from her. They descended from the palace mound and crossed to the temple mound, and it seemed the entire city was there to see, for the feast of the Flayed God was second in importance to none.

She climbed the temple mound alone, on her own two feet, with the jaguar-men standing guard below. The carved and painted murals on each temple riser showed the gods in their glory, forming the miracles of the world. At the top, following the priests’ instructions, she walked four circuits around the worn stone of the exterior altar, then went into the blessedly cool darkness.

Neniza had never seen the inside of a temple. The space was smaller than she expected, given the imposing facade, but it still dwarfed the village shrines she had seen on a few occasions. The back wall was taken up by a hammered gold image of such intricacy that she could not make out half of it; only the World Tree, dominating the center, was clear to her. Copal incense smoked from censers in the four corners, musky and strong. The smell, more than anything, brought home the reality of what she was doing. Copal was the scent of religion. Copal, and blood.

She lay down on the interior altar and waited.

Outside, the clamor of the crowd gave way to melodious singing. The lord’s procession was approaching. Neniza listened, every fiber of her body tight. The clack of spear-hafts: the lord had descended from his palanquin, and the ocelotlaca were standing guard. The chime of jewelry: he was outside the door. A sustained note from the chorus: the lord was performing the rite of bloodletting, piercing his tongue. She could smell the acrid tang as he burnt the strips of bark-paper now wetted with his blood.

Then he entered the temple.

A petitioner in the plaza could not look at the lord of the land. The Rain Bride could. Neniza sat up on the altar, and saw what she had come so far to find.

They said he could take the form of a tremendous serpent, but right now he was shaped like a man. A tall man, sleekly muscled, without the heavy shoulders of an ocelotlacatl. His skin glimmered, scales reflecting the faint light inside the temple. She could see nearly all of that skin; he wore a loincloth of jade and gold, and a pectoral, and a drape of pure white cotton hung from his arms, but his body was mostly bare. There was no hair on him anywhere, not even the smooth curve of his skull, but behind him, rustling as he shifted, Neniza could just see the iridescent quetzal feathers that ran down his back.

The sight of him, permitted to her as it was, still sent her to her knees. “Master,” she whispered, and slid from the altar to the floor.

The quetzalcoatl who ruled the land came toward her, one sinuous step after another. His presence was overpowering. Not a deity to equal the Flayed God, or any of the others honored in the rituals of the year, but not a person, either. Not like those who waited outside.

Least of all like her.

His voice startled her: not Court Speech, but heavily-accented Wide Speech. “Rise, Rain Bride,” he said. “Today we are wed.”

And so the ritual began.

He would ask for her petition later, when they went outside to complete the ritual, so that it could be publicly heard. But all Neniza wanted was this, here, now: to lie with him, just once. Peasants begged it sometimes, for fertility. The Rain Bride did it for duty.

Her entire body trembled as she rose to her feet, but not with fear. Standing all but naked before the lord, her nature awoke within her. The nature her father fought so hard to keep in check, for fear of what it would do. Male or female, whichever form they took, all of their caste felt it. For males, in the wet season, the passion was different. Safer. Kinder.

Neniza was female, in the dry season, and she was not kind.

She reached out for the feathered serpent, bold with the power that was in her, and drew him toward her, onto her, as she laid herself once more on the altar. Even had this not been their purpose here today, he could not have resisted her. She cried out as he entered her, not in pain, but in triumph.

As he moved above her, she felt her power envelop him. Women of other castes rarely if ever wanted what the males of her kind gave them—the strange, unnerving children they birthed—but it was a gift, freely given. Neniza’s rage inverted that power: she gave nothing, and took everything.

Blood dripped from the lord’s mouth where he had pierced his tongue. She licked it off her own lips, tasting his life in that blood, feeling it in his body as he rode her. Feeling it flow from him into her. The sensation was intoxicating, exhilarating; she grew drunk with that power, and a laugh built deep within her.

The feathered serpent shuddered above her, spine rippling like water. She put one hand on the scales of his chest to support his weight.

And he froze, staring at the fingers of her hand.

He tore himself free of her more quickly than she could follow, slithering down from the altar to the temple floor. “Show yourself to me!”

His voice struck her like thunder. However much she despised him, however much he despised her people, she was a woman of his domain, and he was her lord. She could not refuse his command. The power of it forced the mask of flesh from her at last, revealing what lay beneath.

Skin and muscle gave way to wood. The soft, lush body of a young alux woman dissolved, leaving behind the roughly-hewn form of a xera, like the toys children would sometimes carve for themselves before their mothers saw and took them away to be burned. In shape like a person, but not of flesh, and each hand bore only four fingers, mute testimony to the lesser, inferior, outcaste nature of her kind. She could hide anything with the mask, except that.

He bellowed something in Court Speech, and with a clattering rush the ocelotlaca were there, weapons out. Neniza did not care. She knelt on the floor where his command had left her, and she laughed.

“I am no Rain Bride to be sacrificed,” she said, proudly baring her wooden face to them all. “There is no skin to flay from me, no heart to cut out. Your rains can come or not; I do not care.”

“I will sacrifice you anyway,” the quetzalcoatl spat, his words almost unintelligible through his accent. “I will burn you, as I burned your people.”

Her rage could not overcome the power forcing her to kneel, but she snarled and jerked against it. “My father told me what you did. Yes, we live—you will never be rid of us. Not so long as one male of our kind lives to sire more xera on your women. We are always fertile. It is our gift.” She laughed again. “But I am not male. Not since I heard the tale of what you did, and knew what it is to want to kill. Where my father gives, I take. And I have taken your life. Within three days you will be dead. Burn me; I am of wood. But I have no blood from which to take your power back.”

They bound her there inside the temple, and gagged her so she could mock the lord no more. He sent the priests to choose another maiden from the crowd at the base of the mound; Neniza watched as the quetzalcoatl took her on the altar, then listened as they finished the ritual outside. The girl asked for her family to be cared for. The lord promised to honor her request. Then they cut out her heart and flayed the skin from her to bring the rains, because that was how the world worked; everything that mattered was paid for with sacrifice.

Listening to the drums that followed in the wake of the girl’s screams, Neniza wondered if her own blasphemy had tainted the ritual beyond repair. Would there be drought, famine, death?

She did not care. All that mattered was that the lord would not be there to see it.

The signs were already beginning to show when he returned that night. His sleek face was drawn, his delicate scales dulled. The spark that had been in him was in Neniza now, and nothing could take it back.

But they tried. They dragged her from the temple mound back to the palace, and there they ritually abused her wooden body, piercing and splintering it as if she were an enemy noble captured in battle. Neniza laughed at the ironic honor.

She could not bleed, though, and so in the end they did as she knew they must.

The quetzalcoatl stepped in front of her as they hauled her up. She could see the pyre looming large behind him, and shuddered uncontrollably. Watching her fear, the lord said in grim tones, “You may yet escape it. Restore me, and I will spare both you and your father.”

Her father? Neniza would have spat in his face, if her wooden mouth had any moisture in it. She was dry, so dry. Her father was a coward, soft and wet and weak. She would give nothing for his life.

“Take her,” the quetzalcoatl snarled at last, his smooth voice distorted with rage and despair.

They dragged her to the pyre and bound her at its peak, and soon the flames danced up around her, licking eagerly at her dry wooden form. She began screaming, then, and did not stop.

But as she burned she saw, through the smoke and the wavering air, the lord’s withered feathers, ghosting to the ground. And no one, not even Neniza, could tell then if she was screaming or laughing.