“Ah well,” said Chel, looking and sounding placated. “For that, you’ll just have to stick with us.”
By which Stuart understood him to mean, Your wagon is hitched to Xibalba. You’re one of us, whether you like it or not. One of the good-as-dead.
Chel had influence and supporters within the Mayapan area. To those in the know, he was a local hero. What he desired, he got. He put the word about that he was looking for transportation. In no time at all he was in possession of a canvas-topped truck, military surplus. He also received donations of diesel from Xibalba sympathisers, enough jerry-cans of it to travel several hundred miles.
It was a long, jolting journey out of the Yucatan Peninsula, through lush agricultural lowlands, round the rim of the Gulf of Anahuac, north through what had once been Olmec country, on towards the mountainous heart of the Land Between The Seas. They drove through dark and daylight, stopping only to top up the fuel tank, relieve themselves, and refill their bellies.
A day and a half later they were in rainforested high ground. The roads were twisting and treacherous here. The main highways had hairpin bends that teetered above sheer, plummeting drops with often not even a crash barrier to give the illusion of safety. The back roads were worse still, their poor asphalting and the leftover debris from mudslides adding to the general hazardousness, but Chel insisted on using them as much as possible. Less chance of running into a random Jaguar stop-and-search patrol. Less likelihood of someone spying a Caucasian among a group of Anahuac nationals and reporting this suspicious incongruity to the authorities.
Evening was falling as the truck pulled into a hill village perched at high altitude, just below the cloud line. Chel had cousins here, or cousins of cousins. He was vague on the true nature of the connection, perhaps not even sure himself. Distant relatives, at any rate, and they knew Xibalba’s goal and were broadly in favour. The guerrillas and Stuart were put up in the village longhouse, where bedrolls were laid out for them in rows.
“From here to Tenochtitlan, it’s not far,” Chel said that night, as the villagers prepared to roast a wild pig in honour of their guests. “Forty miles in a straight line. We are near the Empire’s beating heart. The Great Speaker doesn’t know it yet, but his days are numbered.”
“If he’s truly a god, then maybe he does know it,” Stuart said. “Divine omniscience and all that.”
“But you don’t believe he is.”
“Of course not. If he’s anything, he’s a man who dreams he’s a god, but more likely he’s a man who knows he’s just pretending. There’s a fiction to be maintained, and he maintains it. The entire Empire is predicated on a lie.”
“And if we can spear that lie and kill it, then the whole structure surrounding it will die too.” The light of the cooking fire danced in Chel’s eyes. The smoke carried delicious smells.
“I’d like to think so. But a ship without its captain will still float.”
“But it won’t sail anywhere, will it?” Chel gave an impatient shake of the head. “You are, if I may say, Mr Reston, proving to be a lot more circumspect than I thought you would be. The Conquistador never struck me as a doubter. His actions carried the weight of absolute conviction. What has happened to that man?”
“Maybe I need my armour,” came the sardonic reply. “Can’t function without it.”
“Ah well, I can help you there. Come with me.”
Chel led him across the village to a hut belonging to one of his relatives. He himself was lodged there. Some of the Xibalba luggage was stacked in a corner, and Chel unzipped a couple of large rucksacks and produced, bit by bit, Stuart’s Conquistador armour. The individual pieces were wrapped in items of clothing so that they wouldn’t clank against one another. The rapier was there, even the flechette gun.
“It’s the one you wore at the theatre,” he said. “The one we removed from you.”
“You’ve had it all along?” Stuart picked up the morion helmet and examined it by the light of the hut’s solitary battery-powered lantern. He turned it this way and that, as if seeing it for the first time in years. That was how unfamiliar it seemed, here in this remote rainforest village, thousands of miles from home. Utterly out of context, and oddly nostalgic.
“I told you I’d get the armour back to you. Now I have. Does it change your mind at all? Persuade you in any way?”
Funnily enough, being reunited with his Conquistador outfit did restore some of Stuart’s sense of mission. He was reminded how invincible he felt while wearing it, how shot through with purpose. It was like some bizarre form of addiction. He was nothing — adrift, rudderless, at the mercy of the elements — without this steel carapace around him and these weapons in his hands. He was an empty shell, and the armour, a shell around shell, somehow made him whole.
“I’ll need to see,” he said slowly. “Tenochtitlan, I mean. See it for myself. Because that’s where we’re going to have to go, isn’t it? And photographs are one thing — everyone knows what Tenochtitlan looks like — but there’s nothing like an eyeball recce to give you a true idea of the nature of a place, its strengths, its weaknesses.”
Chel was encouraged by these words. “I think you should go. Definitely. Zotz can take you. He knows these parts well. Used to live at Tula, to the north.”
Stuart could put a face to the name and knew Zotz was Chel’s lieutenant, but beyond that he’d had little to do with the man. “He seems trustworthy.”
“Trustworthy!” Chel exclaimed. “Zotz would die for me, and I for him. I count him among my closest friends. I’m sure, once you and he have spent some time together, you’ll be able to say the same.”
During the journey to Lake Texcoco, Stuart didn’t feel that he and Zotz were becoming bosom buddies. Zotz seemed to have formed an opinion of him as an effete urbanite unused to hardship. And while there might be some truth in that, Stuart was determined to prove him wrong. As they trekked through the forest, Zotz hacking a path with a machete, he kept pace with him, didn’t lag behind. When it came to paddling the canoe, he gave it his all, tirelessly. He didn’t complain once or query Zotz’s lead. He rested only when Zotz decided to rest, never himself suggesting they take a break.
It wasn’t clear if any of this raised him in the Mayan’s estimation, but gradually Zotz began to treat him with less overt contempt. That had to be counted as positive progress.
Why did he want to get in this man’s good books, if he had no intention of accompanying Xibalba on their fool’s errand?
Stuart couldn’t answer that.
But he reckoned the Conquistador could.
TWELVE
3 Skull 1 Lizard 1 House
(Friday 7th December 2012)
They halted at midnight, mid-river. Zotz roped the canoe to a branch of a teak tree that had toppled into the water. The trunk reached almost all the way across to the opposite bank, like an unfinished bridge. They slept under blankets on the bare boards of the hull while the boat swung gently side to side in the current.
At first light they carried on, using the outboard now. The sound of the two-stroke motor putt-putting, as the boat cut through the tendrils of mist that drifted up from the river, was like someone lazily slapping congas. They passed hamlets where two or three families lived in cramped stilt-dwellings and eked an existence from fishing. Children waved as they went by — skinny, half-naked urchins, splashing barefoot in the shallows. “Hey, white man!” they yelled at Stuart. “Don’t melt in the sun!” It was a hilarious joke, worth repeating over and over until the butt of it was out of earshot. “Don’t melt like ice cream!”
Isolated communities of this kind could be found all over Anahuac, tribal folk living at subsistence level. It was one of the great ironies of the Empire that, while it had the wealth of the world at its disposal, its homeland was littered with pockets of extreme poverty. The Empire looked outward, and consequently paid little attention to what was on its doorstep. Outside the major metropolises — thriving industrial conurbations like Oaxaca, Palenque and Yaxchilan — the people of Anahuac benefited little from Imperial bounty. It was as though the Great Speaker took his own country for granted. Aztec hegemony had existed here for so long, it scarcely merited his interest any more. The newer conquests were more exciting, riper, worthier of cultivation.