Pain. Pain – was–
Pain was an offering. Pain was– I could hardly focus anymore through the growing haze; didn't know where Teomitl was anymore…
The gods took pain, which was the only sincere sacrifice. Prayers were nothing more than children's wishes, but pain and blood made them real – because it cost to give them, and because they were freely offered.
The gods–
There was a familiar litany in my mind: repeated so many times in the calmecac school, in calmer times, on a hill away from the city, where I'd stood with my bloodied worship-thorns, offering up the truest sacrifice for the sake of the Fifth World and of Mictlan.
I had no worship-thorns, and the stars were all gone – my sight blocked by mottled, bluish skin, by distorted limbs and glazed faces. But the hymn – the hymn always remained.
"We leave this earth
This world of jade and flowers
The quetzal feathers, the silver and the jade…"
My voice quavered and broke at the beginning, but soon the familiar words came back and with them some of my assurance. As I spoke, the pain seemed to recede, pushed back into a remote corner of my mind, to be dealt with later.
"Down, down into darkness we must go
Past the rushing waters, past the mountain of knives
We leave this earth…"
I was High Priest for the Dead; I had endured worse than this. I would… I would stand.
The bodies were still pressing against me, but now I saw that they flopped weakly, like fish on dry land, the motions of their limbs and fingers nothing more than reflexes, like the gestures of a man drunk on jimsonweed. I could feel their frantic heartbeat, echoing the mad beat within my own chest.
"The precious necklaces, the precious feathers
The songs and the flowers
The marigold and the cedar trees
We leave this earth…"
There was… light, after a fashion – a weak, pallid radiance that threw everything into stark contrast. The bodies and faces paled, and seemed to recede too, their features growing dimmer and dimmer until they became part of the quivering shadows on the walls.
The weight on my chest was gone; the whole episode feeling like the stuff of nightmares. I pulled myself upwards, slowly, limb by limb, wincing at the pain. My stomach wasn't bleeding, but I still felt as though I'd been mauled, and the fever wasn't gone – it had merely abated for a small moment, enough for me to regain a small part of my senses. But it would come backwhen the hymn stopped running in my mind, when I grew too weak to hold the sickness at bay.
I needed help.
In the darkened room, I caught sight of more bodies, spread around the remnants of a meal – none of them appeared to be moving.
"Teomitl?"
My student was lying a few paces away from the body of Chipahua, twitching and shivering and moaning.
"Teomitl!" I reached out and shook him – he had Jade Skirt's protection, he couldn't fall like this, not to something as foolish and as inconsequential… "Teomitl!"
But there was no answer, and his eyes, when they finally opened, were the filmy white of rotting corpses. He hung limp in my grip and didn't answer. I could – with some effort – have stretched out my priest senses, but I could guess that the magic of Jade Skirt had gone from him.
He couldn't die – he was Master of the House of Darts, heir-apparent to the Mexica Empire, agent of Chalchiuhtlicue in the Fifth World, commander of the army… He was…
At the back of my mind ran the litany – the same words, over and over: Lord Death's lands are vast and deep, and Grandmother Earth awaits; as She does for us all.
He couldn't die… but Tizoc-tzin had died, too, and come back only through a god-blessed miracle, a spell that couldn't be cast again in the Fifth World.
Somehow – somehow I hoisted Teomitl on my shoulders, and staggered out of the house, calling out for the Jaguar Knights, but whether fallen or fled, they wouldn't answer. I couldn't find the boats we'd arrived in, either. So instead, I turned my face away from the blinding light of the sun, and started to walk back to the Sacred Precinct.
Teomitl grew heavier as I walked, and the world shrank into a whirl of colours and sounds: vague faces, fading in and out of focus; a morass of feather headdresses, black-dyed cheeks, and the glint of gold caught in hair as black as night. My feet dragged in the dust and the sounds of the city seemed far away; the clacking noise of the women's loom no more than a distant irritation. The shadows came back, too, swooping over the canals like ahuizotl water-beasts – quivering, always on the edge of leaping.
"We leave this earth
This world of jade and flowers
The quetzal feathers, the silver and the jade…"
They were slowly rising – casting the adobe house into darkness, making the coloured clothes dull and insignificant. My world shrank to this: the burning light of the sun – echoed in the itching that seemed to have overwhelmed my skin – and the shadows, the same that had killed Eptli, which would engulf us all…
My hands shook; I held Teomitl tighter against my chest, afraid I'd let him fall into the dirt. I couldn't let go: I had to get him back to safety – he was my student… My whole body was afire, my stomach a mass of pain. If only I could pause, rest for a while, doubled up in a foetal position, until the pain went away…
The shadows shifted lazily over the canals and the bridges, the assembled throng of peasants in loincloths, the matrons holding baskets of tomatoes and squashes close to their chests. Like the wind, they ruffled the cloaks of war veterans, exposing old, whitish scars that took on the appearance of suppurating sores once more. I trudged on, dragging my feet in the earth. The sun beat on my back – and it seemed that the beat was echoed within me, at the junction of skin and muscle, an endless rhythm like thousands of hands hammering from inside, demanding to be let out.
Ahead, I caught glimpses of the Serpent Wall – the shadows congregated around the snakes atop the wall, in the quetzal-red jaws and green bodies, darkening the scales and the crown of feathers around their heads. Almost there…
Abruptly, Teomitl weighed nothing – no, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. Someone had taken him from me. I had to… had… to… "Teomitl! Acatl!" My sister's face swam out of the morass of shadows – a scant few moments before the fever rose again, and I knew nothing more but the nightmares.
ELEVEN
Bitter Medicines