Wiping a tear from his eyes, Glam thought, I loved her, too, Casca. And she was beautiful to the end. A lovely lady with a heart for everyone and everything. Especially you, you lousy dago." This had been a good place for them. It took only a few fights around the neighborhood to show that this was no place to muck about with.
Glam shivered as he saw again those clear white sightless eyes of Lady Lida. Forty years and she never knew Casca's secret… That's the greatest miracle of all. I never saw a man love anyone as much as he did her. When she died, I thought for a moment he was going to have himself buried with her. But then he's a strange little bastard. Those touched by the gods always are. He has his fate to follow, and personally I don't envy him. But the years have been good…
Laughing in his mead, Glam chuckled and muttered softly: "What was it he first called me? Turnip dick? Ha!"
ONE
Dr. Julius Goldman entered the magnificent doors leading into the sacrosanct interior of the Boston Museum of History. He was late. His footsteps clattered over the polished marble floor, his own sense of urgency seeming to precede him with the echoing sound as he passed the priceless relics of antiquity, the emblems of vanished civilizations. Vases from China. Amphorae from Greece. Each a lonely and mute survivor of its past. Ancient weapons. Time-forgotten ornaments. Each seemed ready to speak, to tell some dark secret of the ages. Despite his haste, Goldman felt the atmosphere of the museum seeping into his brain.
He turned left down an exhibit hall leading toward his destination, the newly acquired exhibit of Mesoamerican art from Mexico. On the way, though, he approached a well-used and exquisitely preserved set of Roman gladiatorial armor, its great helmet and famed Roman short sword hanging expectantly in the silent museum as though suspended in time. Involuntarily his steps slowed, and he stopped in front of the carefully mounted pieces. A gash ran along the belly of the armor, exposing the leather wrappings beneath. Goldman wondered how the man who had been wearing it had come out. As he stood before the armor, images flashed in his brain, and a feeling of second sight came over him, a tumbling of memories lost and found and then gone again before awareness. He saw in his mind's eye a massive stadium filled with people crying for blood. He saw men wearing the armor of the Secutor and the Mirimillone locked in mortal combat, straining to let the lifeblood out of their opponents, and not with any reluctance for they were glorying in their strength. Goldman felt himself part of the Roman games. The smell of the blood-soaked sand stank in his nostrils.
He turned from the armor and entered the Aztec exhibit. The museum had just opened and was practically empty, but Goldman had been here the previous week and he recalled with particular distaste seeing two aficionados of this pre-Columbian culture standing before these exhibits, indulging themselves in a form of controlled, vicarious, mental masturbation… as if by touching and looking at these relics they could claim some kinship with the ones who had actually worn and used the items. Their attitude had been not dissimilar from the motorcycle gangs who wore the swastikas and emblems of Nazi Germany the iron crosses and German helmets and somehow felt that owning and wearing such items imparted the strength and ability to inflict their will on others through terror.
Yet Goldman, too, felt a strange fascination emanating from the exhibits. The artistic level achieved in many of the items was astounding in its detail work. One item particularly arrested Goldman: a feathered shield of cobalt blue feathers with the emblem of the Jaguar god superimposed in tiny gold feathers. It must have taken over a thousand birds to make this one shield for some unknown noble.
Representations of the gods of the Aztecs stood in their cases, imperturbable, the countenance and dress showing the overwhelming Aztec fascination with death. Most horrible of all was Coatlicue, the mother of the Aztec pantheon. Her image towered over the others by the sheer force of her accouterments. Her dress was made of serpents woven together as if they were reeds. She wore a crown of two snake heads. This was set off by a necklace of chopped-off hands and hearts, while monstrous claws took the place of human feet. She and her children seemed to wait patiently for the time when they could again feed on the living hearts and blood of sacrificial victims. In their time, blood had fed them and the Aztecs made sure the gods never hungered for long.
One god, a powerful priest-king, was the most powerful figure in their mythology. Quetzalcoatl and his symbol, the feathered serpent was honored in almost all of ancient Mexico's panoply of gods. Even the Toltec and the Maya knew of him. The Maya honored him under the name of the Kukulcan and told of his coming.
Perhaps because this god was so different from the others, Goldman lingered before his emblem. The fascination of the museum had gripped him.
Part of his mind told him to hurry toward his appointment. Part held him here, immersed in the aura of the land of the feathered serpent.
The Aztecs had inherited Quetzalcoatl along with several other gods when they conquered the Valley of Mexico and its inhabitants. There, at the ruined city they called "The City of the Gods," Teotihuacan, they had found the great temple of the feathered serpent and of Tlaloc, the rain god. Goldman considered the irony of the Aztec inheritance. Many of their names for the gods, many of their words for daily terms came from a bastardization of the captured people's tongue and with the words had come a fateful legend that of the return of Quetzalcoatl. From the conquered people the Aztecs had learned of the great metropolis that had once stood there and how it had fallen to disease and curse when the inhabitants had lost faith with Quetzalcoatl. Their shamans had then foretold that Quetzalcoatl would return in "one reed," which occurred every fifty-two years. And the Aztecs, taking over the calendar of their predecessors from the few remaining survivors, had also taken over not only the legend, but the predicted time of Quetzalcoatl's return "from the sea."
So it was in the year of Our Lord, 1519, on Good Friday or one reed, as the Aztecs reckoned that a fair-haired man set foot on the shores of Mexico. Hernan Cortez had arrived with his men, in suits of shining armor, with horses, with weapons of steel. To the Aztec king, Moctezuma, it was the fulfillment of the ancient legends, for the original priest-king had been fair of hair and had come from the sea. The legends had said that he would return in the same manner as his first appearance.
Moctezuma, believing that Cortez really was the returning Quetzalcoatl, waited too long to resist the Spaniards. It was his belief, not his lack of power, that caused his defeat, for when he had ascended to the throne he had ordered 30,000 people sacrificed to celebrate his becoming emperor. There were only several hundred Spaniards, and Moctezuma could have destroyed them easily. The legend's power was fatal; not until Moctezuma's own son, Qualtemoc, ordered his father killed, was the power of the Aztecs used. They promptly drove the Spaniards from the Aztec capital city, Tenochtitlan. Though many Spaniards escaped, not all did, and for the next several weeks the terrible gods of the Aztecs fed on the blood and beating hearts of Europeans.
But the Aztec triumph was short-lived. The gold of Moctezuma was an irresistible lure, and the doom of the proud Aztec nation was inevitable. Greed coupled with the religious fanaticism of the Spanish Jesuits, those devoted followers of the Inquisition as ordained by the pious Torquemada conquered. Goldman pondered the paradox of the Jesuits. Here were men who felt themselves to be soldiers of their crucified God, Jesus, and in His name, and in the name of pity and love and mercy, they did not hesitate in their holy duty. In a religious fervor that approached ecstasy they were able to burn thousands of heathen sinners alive at the stake. This was done, of course, in order to save the heathens' immortal souls to open the way to the glories of heaven for these heathen. By no means did the Jesuits consider their acts to be acts of cruelty. On the contrary, what they did was done from love. Ironic, Goldman thought, that the Spaniards considered themsebes so different from the Aztecs. For, of course, the heathen Indians had sent their sacrificial victims to their gods in order to deliver their prayers…