‘Can you hear this?’ it asked, more loudly than before.
It had a woman’s voice, throaty, compelling, thrilling. It was a voice to fill a man with yearning even when on the point of death, or perhaps particularly then, when all he has left is the desire for life and what creates life.
I groaned.
It seemed to me that the voice was not speaking to me. The distant voice answered it with a sound like sobbing.
‘Oh, we can do better than this. We can make much sweeter music than this, can’t we?’ purred the snake.
Then it seemed to shed its skin, letting it fall away the way a snake will, leaving last year’s scales draped over a rock or a cactus to dry and shred and blow away in the wind. In the moment before it moved towards me, blotting out the light, I caught a last glimpse of the creature’s body, of the play of shadows over its pure, smooth new flesh, and I thought it was most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The yearning stirred in me again, stronger than before when I had merely heard thecreature’s voice, and when it slithered over me again, curling itself slickly around my manhood, for all my fear I could not find it in me to struggle. Instead I found myself trying to writhe in time with the snake, to match its own undulations with my own, and when I found myself still pinioned too tightly to move it was frustration, not pain or terror, which made me groan again.
‘Oh, this is good!’ The voice had changed, becoming wilder, higher in pitch. ‘Can you hear how good this is?’ Again its words seemed directed somewhere else, despite the intimacy with which its flesh was engaging mine.
A pain, tiny at first but growing and getting more insistent, started to gnaw at the back of my head, even as I heard my own moans of pleasure beginning.
‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’ The words were definitely meant for me now, whispered from lips that brushed my ear in time to them.
I groaned again. I had to get out but there was nothing I could do, and the urge to let this continue was too strong.
‘Why don’t you tell me who you really are?’ The lovely caresses slowed almost to a stop. ‘If you don’t, I might stop. Do you want me to stop?’
I could manage only a gurgling noise.
‘I didn’t think so. I gave you some of those little black seeds of Idle’s. Now you can’t let me stop, can you? We use them ourselves, so I know.’ An unpleasant, snickering little laugh stirred the hair around my ear. ‘Even if this didn’t tell me!’ She squeezed me once, making me gasp. ‘What are you doing here?’
Something other than fear or sexual desire jerked the reply from my throat, something that seemed to have overridden my will and produced answers to her questions without my thinking of them. ‘My name’s Cemiquiztli Yaotl,’ I gasped, ‘a slave of Lord Feathered in Black. I was looking for my son.’
She was still for a moment. Then she rose, still gripping me, to look down at my supine figure. She leaned slightly sideways so that the light, the flickering yellow glow that I could now see came from a pine torch, fell over her face, and, reflected in the light, I caught the glint of a bead of sweat on her cheek.
‘Why did you think he’d come here?’ She was still whispering.
‘I thought he and Kindly’s featherwork might be in the same place.’ Her movements had ceased. Part of me willed them to resume. Part of me wanted to scream at her to stop. The pain in my head was intensifying.
She bent towards me again and I felt her hair and her breath on my face. ‘I don’t have to lie to you about this,’ she murmured. ‘There’s no featherwork here and I don’t know anything about your son. If we ever let you go, you can tell Kindly that. But now …’
She moved again suddenly, her hips grinding against mine with a new urgency, her hands kneading the bare skin of my chest and little cries bursting from her lips.
The pain in my head seemed to expand with her excitement, making me feel that my skull was about to explode. Nausea seized my stomach and the breath stopped in my throat as if I were being choked. I groaned aloud, making a sound like ecstasy even at the moment when my manhood began to shrivel.
The world spun around me, sucking me back down into the darkness. The last thing I heard was her scream.
It was more than a sound of pleasure. It was a war-cry, the vaunting boast of the victor, a triumphant shout.
I drifted in and out of my dreams and from one dream to another.
Fantastic creatures danced in front of me. I thought I sawnests full of snakes, their glittering skins patterned with stripes and whorls and painted in glorious colours, scarlet and yellow and blue and green and colours I had never seen before and never would again, colours that I could taste on the tip of my tongue and whose sounds were like flutes or falling rain or laughter. Sometimes I could not see the snakes but only the patterns on their skins, growing and merging and dividing and wavering before my eyes.
I thought I was in a room filled with birds. Their wings darkened the space around me and their beat filled my ears until it drowned out my own heartbeat. Their feathers seemed to fill my nose and mouth, making me sneeze and gag.
Then I found myself in a world peopled by gods.
A single, brilliant light shimmered through my tears. It seemed to pulse in time with the throbbing at the back of my head. Was this what the Sun looked like, I wondered, when seen from the Thirteen Heavens, above the sky and the clouds? Or had night fallen and the Sun dropped below the western horizon, parting from the souls of dead mothers who formed his guard of honour before making his return journey through the land underneath the Earth? I felt a chill come over me as I realized that I might be in one of the nine regions of Mictlan, the Land of the Dead.
I wanted to move then, to run away or beat my fists on the ground or curl up into a ball around my terror and the pain and the sick feeling in my stomach, but something held me flat on the ground, at the mercy of any creature or demon that might come for me.
At that moment I knew I must be dead or dying, because I heard a woman’s voice.
It seemed to me that I had heard it not long before but had not known it for what it was, but now there was no mistaking it. It had no words for me, but that did not matter. Rackedwith bitter sobs, each one torn out of a throat tormented by pain and hunger and reproach and regret and flung at me through the icy darkness of Hell, it could only belong to Cihuacoatl, Snake Woman, the goddess whose cries were the most terrifying sound an Aztec could hear, foretelling utter disaster, death and the ruin of the city.
‘No,’ I wanted to cry out, but all I could manage was a husky whisper between dry lips.
A large, irregular shadow filled my vision. Its shape was strange, but familiar. As it dawned on me what I was looking at, I felt all my fear renewed and redoubled.
I had seen every detail of the figure before. From the long, graceful plumes that towered over his head and flowed down his back to the sheen of obsidian on his sandals and, more than anything else, the blank, terrifying, gaping face of his serpent mask, I could not fail to recognize the god. I was in the presence of Quetzalcoatclass="underline" the Feathered Serpent himself.
I dared not make a noise. I lay, paralysed with fear, watching him as he knelt over me.
The black pits that served him for eyes seemed to roam speculatively over my helpless, bound body. I squirmed, my buttocks clenching as my bowels threatened to turn into water.
Then the god advanced upon me, with a small, glittering object in his hand. I could not help a squeal of fright as I recognized a copper knife: an implement fine enough to prise feathers apart, or peel a man’s skin away in layers. I was a gripped by a fear of something worse than death: if I truly was in Hell, could the god go on torturing me for ever?
‘No …’
The god stood over me. He raised his free hand, extended his finger, and held it up in front of his mouth. He was motioning me to silence.