"Seize this foul creature—but seize him gently, for he is all that remains of a girl who once was alive."
The small priest in Nochipa's skin stood blinking in unbelief, and then two of my warriors had him. The other five or six priests of the train came shouldering through the crowd, angrily protesting my interruption of the ceremony. I ignored them and said to the men holding the god-impersonator:
"Her face is separate from her body. Remove the face from him—with the greatest care—and bear it reverently to that fire yonder, and say some small prayer for her who gave it beauty, and burn it. Bring me the opals she wore at her throat."
I averted my own face while that was done. The other priests began to rage even more indignantly, until Angry at Everybody gave such a fearsome snarl that the priests became as quiet and meek as the motionless crowd.
"It is done, Knight Mixtli," said one of my men. He handed me the necklace; some of the firefly stones were red with Nochipa's blood. I turned again to the captive priest. He no longer wore my daughter's hair and features, but his own face, and it twitched with fright.
I said, "Lay him supine on the ground, right here, being very careful not to lay rough hands on my daughter's flesh. Peg his hands and feet to the ground."
He was, like all the priests of the train, a young man. And he screamed like a boy when the first sharp stake was hammered through his left palm. He screamed four times altogether. The other priests and people of Yanquitlan moved and murmured, rightly apprehensive of their own fate, but all my soldiers held their weapons at the ready, and no one dared be the first to try to run. I looked down at the grotesque figure on the ground, writhing against the four stakes that fixed its spraddled extremities. Nochipa's youthful breasts proudly pointed their russet nipples toward the sky, but the male genitals protruding from between her spread legs had gone flaccid and shrunken.
"Prepare lime water," I said. "Use much lime in the concentration, and drench the skin with it. Keep on wetting the skin all night long, until it has become well sodden. Then we will wait for the sun to come up."
Angry at Everybody nodded approvingly. "And the others? We await your command, Knight Mixtli."
One of the priests impelled by terror, lunged between us and knelt before me, his bloodstained hands clutching the hem of my mantle, and he said, "Knight Commander, it was by your leave that we conducted this ceremony. Any other man here would have rejoiced to see his son or daughter chosen for the personation, but it was yours who best met all the qualifications. Once she had been chosen by the populace, and that choice approved by the people's priests, you could not have refused to relinquish her for the ceremony."
I gave him a look. He dropped his gaze, then stammered, "At least—in Tenochtítlan—you could not have refused." He tugged at my mantle again and said imploringly, "She was a virgin, as required, but she was mature enough to function as a woman, which she did. You told me yourself, Knight Commander: do all things required by the gods. So now the girl's Flowery Death has blessed your people and their new colony, and assured the fertility of this ground. You could not have withheld that blessing. Believe me, Knight Commander, we intended only honor... to Xipe Totec and to your daughter... and to you!"
I gave him a blow that toppled him to one side, and I said to Qualanqui, "You are familiar with the honors traditionally accorded to the chosen Xipe Totec?"
"I am, friend Mixtli."
"Then you know the things that were done to the innocent and unblemished Nochipa. Do all the same things to all this filth. Do it in whatever manner you please. You have sufficient soldiers. Let them indulge themselves, and they need not hurry. Let them be inventive, and leisurely at it. But when all that is done, I want nobody—nothing—left alive in Yanquitlan."
It was the last command I gave there. Angry at Everybody took charge then. He turned and barked more specific orders, and the crowd howled as if already in agony. But the soldiers moved eagerly to comply with their instructions. Some of them swept all the adult men into a separate group, and held them there with their weapons. The other soldiers put down their arms and took off their clothes and went to work—or to play—and when any one of them tired, he would change places with one of those standing guard.
I watched, all through the night, for the great fires kept the night alight until dawn. But I did not really see, or gloat at what happened before my eyes, or take any satisfaction in the reprisal. I paid no heed to the screams and bellows and wails and other, more liquid noises occasioned by the mass rape and carnage. I could see and hear only Nochipa dancing gracefully in the firelight, singing melodiously as she did so, to a single flute's accompaniment.
What Qualanqui had ordered, what actually occurred, was this. All the smallest children, the babes in arms and toddling infants, were snatched by the soldiers and cut to pieces—not quickly, but as one would slowly peel and slice a fruit for the eating of it—while their parents watched and wept and threatened and cursed. Then the remaining children, all those judged old enough to be sexually used, the males as well as females, were used by the Tecpanéca, while their older sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers were forced to look on.
When those children had been so riven that they no longer afforded pleasure, the soldiers flung them aside to die. They next seized the bigger children, and the adolescent girls and boys, and finally the younger women and men—I have mentioned that the priests were all young men—and similarly served them. The one priest staked to the ground watched and whimpered, and looked fearfully down toward his own vulnerably exposed parts. But even in this slavering rampage, the Tecpanéca realized that that one was not to be touched, and he was not.
From time to time, the older men penned at one side tried frantically to break loose, when they saw wives, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters being despoiled. But the ring of guards stolidly held the men captive, and would not even let them turn away from watching the spectacle. Finally, when every other usable piece of flesh had been used until it was no longer usable, when it lay dead or lay wishing and trying to die, the Tecpanéca turned to the older folk. Though by then somewhat depleted of both appetite and ability, the soldiers managed adequately to ravish all the mature women, and even the two or three elderly grandmothers who had made the journey.
The next day's sun was high when all that was over, and Angry at Everybody ordered the penned men let loose. They, the husbands and fathers and uncles of the ruined, went about the littered ground, flinging themselves weeping on this and that limp, broken, naked body besmeared with blood and drool and omícetl. Some of the used bodies were still alive, and they lived to see the soldiers—at Qualanqui's next command—seize their husbands and fathers and uncles. What the Tecpanéca did to those men with their obsidian knives, and with the things they amputated, made each man sexually abuse himself while he lay bleeding to death.
Meanwhile, the staked-down priest had been keeping quiet, perhaps hoping he had been forgotten. But as the sun rose higher, he realized that he was to die more hideously than all the others, for what was left of Nochipa began to exact its own revenge. The skin, saturated with lime water, slowly and excruciatingly contracted as it dried. What had been Nochipa's breasts gradually flattened as the skin tightened its embrace around the priest's chest. He began to gasp and wheeze. He might have wished to express his terror in a scream, but he had to hoard what air he could inhale, just to live a little longer.