A spear comes past, already falling. I’m gone.
About a kilometer and a half past them, I see the runner ahead, still in his casual lope. He hears the hoofbeats, he turns his head, he gives a little jump, and when he comes down he turns into a copper streak.
The distance between us actually widens a moment. This guy is fast. Then the horse’s hooves eat up ground. Ahead of the runner to the right of the path is a small stone shelter of some sort, maybe for travelers caught out in the rain.
We both close on it. I’ve got my club, and I raise it. He’s looking back over his shoulder at me; he moves ahead again; I lean over to hit him as we draw even.
There is a dull crash and he disappears as the edge of the rock house whizzes past. Like a left fielder after a line foul, he’s watching me and not the road, and he ran into the wall, face first.
I turn and watch him bounce once, sideways out into the pathway. I put up the club and watch my riding.
It’s like I’m pain in a body, and the runners are nerve impulses trying to tell the body that something’s wrong. Only I’m moving faster than they are. My intention is to give the Huastecas a toothache all the way down to their insteps.
I pass more blockhouses, and other houses too. I meet some runners. Some of the guards actually get off a spear or arrow before I go by.
The closest brush comes when I overtake one of the casual runners about half a kilometer before a blockhouse. There are cultivated fields all around now, but no one seems to be working them. A holiday? Of course. Come see the gods eat the mound-builders. Have a bite while you’re at it.
I’m thinking all this while the messenger ahead of me is in the low-running position. He looks like a cartoon, all arms, pumping legs, strobing bare feet. And he’s still got lungs enough to yell so they can hear him at the guardhouse.
There are four or five of them, they have lots of warning, they are awake. One of them’s giving orders, they’re fanning out, bracing their spears in the roadway, which is now four meters wide and occasionally paved. The guy giving orders is scared but grim.
The runner ahead of me gives one last burst and heads off into the field, trampling corn, duty forgotten.
I kick the horse and head for the waiting guards.
What they tell you to do with an arrow that’s not in a vital spot is to push it through until the head protrudes, break off the shaft, and pull it back out the entry hole.
On horseback, that’s not as easy as it sounds. The arrow was in the meat of my left arm. It already had an exit hole. I spurred the horse, got a kilometer past the guardhouse, then reined in.
I pushed the head the rest of the way out, screaming all the time. It felt like the world’s worst zit pain all the way through my body. The arm went numb. I took out my bayonet, cut the arrowhead off, then tried to pull the shaft back out.
There was no way I could do it. I closed my eyes and yanked. The shaft came out of my arm; I came out of the saddle.
I held on somehow.
Behind me, they’d started a fire. Daring and resourceful guards were getting word to the city. The King of the Huastecas would probably reward them with my head when they caught me.
I slapped a local anesthetic and an astringent on the hole, tied a dressing on the arm with the other hand, and turned the horse off across the fields, paralleling the roadway.
The city was like a white Oz. The suburbs, cornfields, sunflower stalks, old pumpkin vines, and small adobe huts had blocked my view long enough. When I came to a cleared plaza in one of the hamlets and saw the city, I thought I was on another planet.
It had a wall around it, but not a very high one. There was a river to discourage attack. What showed over the walls were gleaming brown and white buildings three and four stories tall. The tops of flat pyramids rose above those. There was some hullabaloo going on at the central one. That was my target.
The causeway over the river to my right was solid spears, shields, and headdresses. The one to my left (the arm with the quickly returning pains) was sparsely defended, though the guys there were ready and waiting, too.
I headed into the river between the two bridges. The lathered horse plunged in. The water wasn’t deep; I don’t think the horse swam for more than a few seconds before it found bottom again, came up, plunged ahead. The bridge on the right emptied as the guards all ran back inside the city to cut me off.
From inside the city came the muffled sound of horns and drums.
The horse found gravel and bucked ahead. The guards on the left got ready. Arrows flew by me from the wall left and above.
We tore across the small beach. The suburbs and fields lay to the left, the city wall to my right shoulder. The guards on the causeway milled around, some heading back into the city, some running to the beach end of the bridge.
I kicked the horse and we went up, hanging in the air, shuddering, to the roadway toward the gate. Spears went by; one slid along the horse’s neck and ricocheted back into the water.
We were up then, inside the gate, riding down two bowmen who tried to stop us.
Before we got here, it had seemed like the whole city was waiting for us, but as we went farther, I realized we were only some minor administrative inconvenience to the populace at large.
The streets themselves were deserted; the horse’s hooves echoed off the empty houses. There were yells, and horns blowing behind me, other sounds from a side street. In the main plaza were the noises of muffled drumbeats and a ceremonial horn.
It was high noon.
Not even Ben-Hur made me ready for the scene in front of me. I slowed the horse to a trot. I came out of the narrow gate street into an open concourse beyond which lay the plaza.
In the center of the city, looming over it, the great white pyramid took a bite out of the blue sky. At its top, two fires in front of the temple poured smoke into the air.
Along the steps all the way up were armed guards.
At its base were other guards, and Took’s people and other mound-builders, lined up in single file. The Huastecas, thousands and thousands of them, watched from the plaza, a gaudy smudge of headdresses, red and purple, jaguar skins, black hair, gold, copper, parrots, and obsidian, row on row on row.
Some of Took’s people were strung in a line up the pyramid. At the top five priests waited. A moundbuilder reached the top step as I reined in. Four of the priests grabbed him, pulled him backwards, chest up, over a rounded stone. The fifth priest, covered with something that looked like flapping gray rags, lifted a big black knife.
He brought it down. Blood went everywhere. He hacked and pulled. Another lump of blood flew into the air. The priest pushed his hand in the chest, hacked with the knife again. Something slid across the mound-builder’s leg, onto the slab top. The priest reached down, picked it up. Blood dripped from it; it slipped through his fingers onto the victim’s body.
The priest grabbed it again, held it up, then threw it into the leftward of the two fires.
The crowd yelled as the heart went into the flames: ‘Huitzilipochtli!’
The other four priests pushed the body to the left, over the pyramid steps, where the guards rolled it down the sides.
The festivities had just started. One body had already reached the bottom, two others were partway down. Huastecas wearing nothing but breechcloths picked up the first one and took it off behind a screen, stage right.
The line of Took’s people and other strangers stretched across the plaza and back up into a building. The crowd was going to be very tired by the time the show was over. The priest and the rounded rock were already covered with blood.