The waiter appeared with a jug of black coffee. Extepan waited until he was gone.
‘During the invasion of Japan,’ he went on, ‘captured Mexica were staked to the ground and had boiling oil poured over them. In Cape Colony their limbs and genitals were cut off and they were left to be eaten by scavengers. During the fighting in the Midlands of England, Mexica prisoners were executed by slow disembowelment. This took the form of slashing a crucifix in their abdomens, then tearing back the skin—’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘Under the extremes of war, every atrocity is possible, and any race may be the perpetrators. Many killings are supposedly done in the name of religion, but usually that’s simply a rationalization for barbarity. Do you think the British soldiers who disembowelled their prisoners with the sign of the cross were true Christians?’
I was silent.
‘I’m not condoning what those soldiers did in the church, and I’ll see to it that an investigation is carried out to try to discover who was responsible. But I’m not surprised that it happened. The war has been bitter here, and atrocities have been committed by both sides.’
‘They tore his heart out and burnt it in a helmet. It was a sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli.’
Extepan sighed, his patience threadbare. ‘I’m very well aware that most of our enemies believe that we still practise human sacrifice, cannibalism and doubtless other barbaric rites that I have no inkling of. It’s the nature of war to see one’s enemies as devils, and rational argument is powerless against such superstitions. We aren’t devils, Catherine. We’re human beings like any other.’
‘Yours is the only nation that’s made a religion of war. It’s obvious to everyone that the Aztecs are intent on swallowing up the whole world.’
For once he did not take me to task for using the blanket term ‘Aztec’ rather than ‘Mexica’. Instead he simply said, ‘We are no more belligerent than you British were when your empire was expanding. We fight to protect our interests, as you did. There’s not so much to choose between us, except that we are the victors and you’re the losers. I can’t say I care for your hypocrisy.’
I decided to match his anger with my own insistence.
‘I want to know,’ I said. ‘Are such sacrifices commonplace?’
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘They’re not.’
‘Will you give me your word of honour?’
For a moment I thought he might erupt with rage. He rose.
‘If it’s necessary, then I give it. You will excuse me. There is much to be done before we reach the front line.’
He went off to join his generals.
Pachtli returned soon afterwards, and I steeled myself for the worst. But he looked sullen, and I wondered if Extepan had said anything to him about the sacrifice. He slumped in the seat opposite me, and, to my relief, folded his arms across his chest and went to sleep.
Onwards, deeper and deeper into Russia. I had never seen such flatness, such wildness and desolation. Despite the ample evidence of human habitation – the fields, grain silos like fat rockets, huddled villages and towns, distant apartment blocks of community-farm workers – despite all this, the landscape seemed raw and empty, the works of humans dwarfed by the scale of the natural world, the immense snow-laden sky, the wind gusting down from the polar regions, the massed ranks of black pines like Nature’s armies awaiting mobilization.
At length I began to notice moving dots in the sky – aircraft – and then fields whose snow had been churned by caterpillar treads or blown into telltale arcs by hovership skirts. I saw a bare plain littered with the black hulks of Russian tanks, too many to count. There were hundreds of smaller dark mounds in the snow. The train veered away, rushing through another town. Here, many of the buildings had been destroyed. There was a lurch, and the sound of the wheels on the rails changed subtly. The train turned down a siding which looked newly constructed. In the near distance was a dense stand of bare trees and numerous vehicles and men.
Extepan returned. He had donned his snowsuit. Shaking Pachtli awake, he ordered him to fetch my luggage.
‘We’ll soon be there,’ he said to me. ‘Please get dressed.’
He was stiff, formal, not deigning to look at me. I reached for my jacket.
‘I’m glad I decided to bring you with me,’ he said. ‘It’s one thing to talk about war, quite another to see it for yourself.’
An hour later I stood surrounded by a cluster of snowsuited Aztec generals on a low rise at the edge of the stand of trees.
We were looking east, and I could just make out the road and railway line crossing one another in the distance. Rzhev, apparently less than ten miles away, was just over the horizon. No one was able – or willing – to tell me whether or not the Russians had evacuated it.
Dusk was beginning to gather, and the clouds had started to empty their burden of snow. The fat flakes gusted down, coating the heads and shoulders of the military élite. They stamped their feet in the snow, slapped their mittened hands together, but mostly they were still and silent, awaiting the activation of the weapon without impatience.
I had expected to find a giant missile launcher or cannon pointing east, but there was nothing on the ridge except for a long cylindrical trailer, a single gold sunburst on its flank. Extepan had taken me inside the trailer after we disembarked from the train. It was packed with flickering viewscreens, bristling with electronics. Aztec technicians attended the equipment, supervised by none other than Maxixca, his squat figure buttoned up in the uniform of the tlacochcalcatl.
On seeing me, Maxixca made no effort to hide his surprise and irritation. But he recovered sufficiently to salute his half-brother. Evidently Extepan remained in overall command of the campaign, though Maxixca now technically equalled him in rank, a development which I found ominous. Both would have seats on the tlatocan and a vote in the most important decisions affecting the empire.
‘All is ready,’ Maxixca said briskly in Nahuatl.
‘Is the target in range?’ Extepan asked.
Maxixca nodded. ‘We’ve been ready to fire for the past half-hour, awaiting only your arrival. We have another twenty minutes, perhaps. No more.’
‘Any reports of troop movements in the area?’
‘None. Our intelligence suggests that defensive units have been withdrawn from the outskirts of the town.’
‘And the town itself? Has it been evacuated?’
‘We have no information on that.’
‘And still no response to our ultimatum?’
‘None.’
‘What about your spy satellites?’ I said. ‘I thought they were supposed to see all.’
Maxixca glared at me.
‘What is she doing here?’ he said angrily to Extepan. ‘She’s a civilian.’
‘She brought me good news from London,’ Extepan said evenly. ‘I have a son.’
Maxixca remembered the formalities of rank and etiquette. He gave a deep bow, then straightened.
‘My congratulations. May he grow strong and brave. Do we proceed with the activation of the beam?’
‘When I give the order.’
Without further ado, he led me back outside.
‘Beam?’ I said. ‘What sort of beam?’
‘You’ll soon see for yourself,’ he told me.
Now I stood beside him as he scanned the horizon with night-seeing binoculars. I thought it unlikely that he could make out anything in the snow-thick dusk; perhaps it was just a ploy to keep Maxixca waiting.
At length he looked back towards the trailer. It was back-dropped by the silver-and-black trunks of birches, and the whole scene was like a study in monochrome except for the golden sunburst in the trailer’s flank and the illuminated wedge-shaped screen at its front. Maxixca was framed in it.