Just plain barking, he nearly added.
“And now, I really should be going.” Stuart stood. “If someone could point me in the direction of the nearest exit…?”
“He speaks like that?” snapped the oldest person in the room, a wizened white-haired crone with a peevish cast to her features. “To us?”
“Well put, Tzitzi,” said Xipe Totec. “Told you we should kill him. Who’s in favour? Show of hands.”
There were loud murmurs around the table, a rumble of disgruntled agreement. Hands rose.
“Now, now,” said Quetzalcoatl firmly. “None of that. Everybody, settle. Mr Reston, sit back down.”
Stuart considered disobeying; weighed the options; sat.
“It’s interesting that you take this view,” Quetzalcoatl went on, “that we must be impostors.”
Stuart shrugged. “What else can you be? There are no gods. Never have been. And even if there were, I can’t imagine them being anything like you.”
“How so? In what way are we not what you imagine?”
“Gods aren’t physical. Touchable. Human.”
“Human we’ll set aside for now, but physical, touchable? Why not?”
“Where’s the otherworldliness? The mystery?”
“Is that what you want from gods? Distance? Ineffability?”
“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to get?”
“Tell me, Mr Reston, how much exactly do you know about the pantheon?”
“You mean apart from all the mythology I had shoved down my throat during religious instruction lessons at school? The mystery plays I kept getting dragged to by my parents? The references that priests constantly insert into their public speeches? Oh, not much.”
“You must be aware, then, that the gods bicker, the gods try to outdo one another, the gods eat, shit, fart, fornicate, just like people do. The gods aren’t paragons. They can die, too. Take what happened to Mayahuel, for instance.”
“That wanton slut,” muttered the crone known as Tzitzi. This, Stuart assumed, was Tzitzimitl, queen of demons. Or rather, meant to be her.
“Fine way to speak about your own granddaughter,” said Quetzalcoatl.
“Girl was no better than she ought to be. She deserved what I did to her.”
“Yes, yes,” Stuart said. “A charming story. A lesson in family values. Mayahuel wanted to bring humans happiness, and so she decided to share with them the recipe for pulque. Tzitzimitl wasn’t too pleased about this.”
“Why should we have given humans pulque?” Tzitzimitl grumbled. “If they couldn’t figure out how to make it for themselves, why should they have any help? It doesn’t always bring them happiness, anyway. Just makes them maudlin and sick most of the time.”
This was turning into the most surreal conversation Stuart had ever had. These people, nutjobs all, were adamant that they were gods. They were immersed in their various divine personas, playing them to the hilt. There was little point in him trying to persuade them otherwise. They wouldn’t listen. All he could do was play along, humour them, and hope he could get out of this place before any harm came to him. He didn’t think any of them could outfight him, but with nutjobs you never knew.
“So Tzitzimitl sent some of her demons to stop Mayahuel,” he said, “which seems a bit petty to me, but there you go. Quetzalcoatl was on Mayahuel’s side and hid her in a tree.”
“Disguised her as a tree, I think you’ll find,” Quetzalcoatl said. “Camouflaged her.”
“But the demons, the Tzitzimime, found her anyway and tore her to bits. Quetzalcoatl buried her bones.”
“With great sadness. She was a lovely creature, Mayahuel. Naive, but sweet.”
“And from her bones, so it’s said, a spiny plant grew — agave — and Quetzalcoatl taught the Aztecs how to milk it for its sap, ferment the sap to ‘honey water,’ distil that further for greater potency, and hey presto, pulque.”
“An accomplishment of which I am justly proud.”
“Not that any of it actually happened,” said Stuart. “It’s just an explanatory myth. If it’s of any interest, it’s because it informs us that even gods aren’t above killing one another.”
“True enough, Mr Reston,” said Quetzalcoatl. “Nevertheless, being familiar with this tale of vindictiveness and murderous jealousy, and knowing it to be typical of divine behaviour, do you really still feel gods are ineffable? Perfect? Shouldn’t they in fact behave more like, well, the way you’re seeing us behave?” He touched a finger to his own chest, then indicated his companions.
“I’m not saying you people aren’t accurate representations of the pantheon. I’ve already told you I think you’re making a nice job of that. I just think I’d prefer gods, if we must have gods at all, who are a bit more, well, godly. A god is something one should look up to, isn’t it? By definition. Not something that’s just a human with a few extra bells and whistles.”
“Death,” Mictlantecuhtli intoned. “This little thing, this crawling bug, this worm, he insults us at every turn. Every word that comes out of his mouth is another drip of disrespectful venom. He is as contemptuous and discourteous as any of his kind. Death, I say. Swift and sudden. He must pay for his temerity.”
“I agree, Dark One.” This from Xipe Totec, who was half out of his seat, with an item of cutlery glinting in his hand. Stuart got up too and backed away from the table in order to give himself room to manoeuvre. Xipe Totec — the man who was claiming to be Xipe Totec — took a menacing step towards him. Stuart ran through all the permutations for disarming and crippling an opponent. For all that Xipe Totec was fit-looking and young, for all that he had a mad gleam in his eye and a reasonably sharp knife in his hand, Stuart was confident about being able to beat him. If all the other so-called gods piled in as well, that would be a different matter, but if Stuart made his treatment of Xipe Totec sufficiently brutal and devastating, perhaps he could scare them off and buy himself time to make a getaway.
Quetzalcoatl placed himself between the two of them. “Flayed One,” he warned Xipe Totec. “What did I say? This man is under my protection. You do not lay a finger on him.”
“Try and stop me, Plumed Serpent.”
“Don’t make me have to. Mr Reston’s problem is not a lack of deference. It’s that he’s labouring under a misapprehension. He still hasn’t perceived the full import of what’s in front of him, and he’s not to blame for that. He has somewhat been thrown in at the deep end. Would any of you, I wonder, on meeting gods for the first time, meekly accept they were what they said they were?”
“Maybe not,” said Azcatl, “if I had a human’s limitations and a human’s frailties. I wouldn’t want to believe they were gods, because that would drive home my own weakness and insignificance.”
“I’m just not one of the faithful,” Stuart said. “Sorry, folks. If you’d tried this stunt on almost anybody else, it might well have worked. You’ve really thought it through, all the little details, the interrelationships, everything. But I’ve had the belief trait, whatever little of it I was born with, burned out of me by life. You couldn’t have picked a worse test subject.”
People at the table were still bristling. Nothing he was saying pleased them.
“Mr Reston.” Quetzalcoatl laid an arm round his shoulders. “May I call you Stuart? Perhaps you’d like to walk with me, Stuart. Staying in this room and continuing to speak as you do might not be good for your health. My protection extends only so far. Xipe Totec ranks as high as I do. We are two of the Four. I can’t order him to keep his hands off you, I can only recommend and, perhaps, plead.”
“You’re telling me if I value my life, go with you.”
“That,” said Quetzalcoatl, “is exactly what I’m telling you.”
“Fine. Works for me.”
NINETEEN
Same Day
They exited the refectory, leaving behind a baleful silence.
“I didn’t make myself any friends back there, did I?” said Stuart.