My master had gone to great lengths to appease him today, judging by the fresh flowers heaped in front of the idol and the equally fresh blood, whose reek overpowered the flowers’ scent. The headless bodies of sacrificial quails lay on the ground around him, their precious water of life spilling on to the earth-covered floor to make a rich dark paste.
The old man was coming to the end of a song. Old Black Feathers was a priest as well as head of the household, and the words he was intoning must have been so familiar to him that he could have mumbled them in his sleep. Yet there was something in the way he spoke them — a real fervour, such as I had not heard in his voice in years — that told me he genuinely needed Tezcatlipoca’s help tonight.
‘I make offerings
Of Flowers and Feathers
To the Giver of Life.
He puts the eagle shields
On the arms of the men,
There where the war rages,
In the midst of the plain.
As our sons,
As our flowers,
Thus you, warrior of the shaven head,
Give pleasure to the Giver of Life …’
He groaned his way through the verses as if wringing them from within his own heart.
I knew that they had been composed by his own long-dead sister, Macuilxochitl, many years before. Was that a coincidence, I wondered, or was he deliberately setting out to remind the god of everything his family had done to honour him, as if asking him to return the favour?
‘Laying it on a bit thick tonight, isn’t he?’ I muttered.
The man next to me in the crowd looked at me curiously. He was shorter than I was, slightly stooped, and his hair was grey and thinning. He wore a plain cloak that did not quite reach his knees and his hair was loose and unadorned. He looked like a commoner, but I assumed he was a merchant, concealing his wealth as they always did, or perhaps a craftsman — a lapidary or a goldsmith or a featherworker. My master was not given to inviting people to his house unless they were likely to have something he wanted: knowledge or money or a skill he could use.
I noticed he had been giving his blood to the gods; his cheeks and neck were covered with it, and some was still glistening.
‘If he is, it’s hardly surprising. We all have to appease the gods tonight. Why else do you think we’re all standing out here? Haven’t you heard?’
‘No.’
My reply took him aback. ‘Have you been asleep all day or something?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ve not heard what happened last night.’
It was my turn to stare. Surely, he could not mean my master was beseeching the god to help him because of what we had been doing the previous night. I could see why he might have done, because our adventures on the lake had added a last twist to the crazy turns his fortunes had taken lately. However, there was no way old Black Feathers would have let that become public knowledge.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said carefully.
The man had been whispering, but now he lowered his voice until it was almost inaudible beneath the musicians’ thumping and squealing and my master’s entreaty to the god.
‘You must be the only person in Mexico who hasn’t heard! A god has been seen, in the streets, in the north of the city, in Tlatelolco. Several people saw him — I saw him myself! It was Quetzalcoatl, it was the Feathered Serpent!’
He looked at me expectantly.
If he expected me to gasp or groan or cry out or start tearing at my hair and skin or do whatever else people are meant to when seized by fear of the gods and the anticipation of their own doom, he was disappointed.
‘Really?’ I said.
I had reached my own understanding with the gods many years before. They had given their own blood and bodies to form the first humans and make the Sun and the Moon rise. To sustain them and recompense them for their sacrifice, we offered them the hearts and lives of great and beautiful warriors. Because we did that, we claimed the right to address them on their own terms. Whimpering with fright would not make the crops grow, stop the lake flooding or deflect the spears of our enemies; making sacrifices and demanding that the gods accept them and do as we asked just might.
Which is not to say that I took no notice of omens or that most of the city was not transfixed by them. Almost anything, from seeing a rabbit run into your house to dreaming about your teeth falling out, could be taken as a portent. In recent years, more strange things than ever had been seen: strange lights in the sky, temples bursting into unquenchable flames for no reason, the lake boiling and rising on a day when the air was still. Perhaps that was why everyone was so jittery about this latest apparition. Looking around me, it seemed to me that the crowd in the Chief Minister’s courtyard was unusually large, and unusually silent and attentive, even for Aztecs.
‘So what happened, exactly?’ I asked.
‘You’re a cool one,’ my neighbour grumbled. ‘What happened? Why, the god was seen up there, just after midnight. Lots of people saw the same thing. When Lord Feathered in Black heard about it, he summoned us all here.’ As Chief Minister my master was ultimately responsible for what went on in the streets of the city, and gods roaming around on the loose were clearly something he had to know about. I wondered whether he had been as sceptical about what he had heard as I was.
‘You say lots of people saw it?’ The streets of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were usually deserted at night. There were too many malignant spirits about. Nobody wanted to risk seeing an owl, a sure portent of your own death, or meeting the Divine Princesses, the ghosts of mothers dead in childbirth who avenged themselves on men by bringing sickness upon them.
‘I think there was a feast,’ my neighbour said defensively. ‘Maybe some of the guests …’
‘Maybe some of the guests had had a few too many sacred mushrooms. They might have seen anything!’
‘Do you want to hear about this or not?’ He took mysilence as assent. ‘The god was running — or trying to run. He was staggering along the side of a canal, and shouting — cursing. It was like he was drunk.’
‘What made everyone think he was Quetzalcoatl?’
‘He looked like him! He had a serpent’s face, all smooth and glittery, and the rest of him was covered in feathers — feathers sprouting from his head and down his back and even from his pendant and the shield he was carrying, great long green feathers everywhere. You should have seen it!’ he went on, breathlessly. ‘The most beautiful quetzal feathers ever, like nothing I’ve ever seen — and I’m a featherworker!’
I was still cautious. The description sounded too accurate: too much like the images that decorated countless shrines and temples. ‘Did you really see all this?’
‘I’m telling you, I was there! He was right in front of me — as close as you are now.’
‘You weren’t a guest at this feast you mentioned, I suppose?’ The more I heard, the more convinced I was it was the sacred mushrooms talking.
‘No,’ he said, plainly nettled. ‘Look, I was as sober as I am now, all right?’
I sighed; I had really not meant to start a row. ‘All right. I’m sorry, it just sounds incredible. Weren’t you scared?’
‘Scared? Look,’ he said, with a perverse note of pride, ‘I’m not ashamed to say it — I was so scared I wet myself!’
‘So you were wandering around in Tlatelolco by yourself …’
‘I was walking by the canal that separates Pochtlan from Amantlan — you know it?’ I did: I could picture the broad waterway, edged on both sides by landing stages and the whitewashed walls of houses and courtyards, most of them large and well kept, since Pochtlan and Amantlan were two of the richest parishes in the city. ‘I heard the commotion on the otherside — someone shouting, and running feet. It was too dark to see much in the way of detail from the other side of the water.’ The only light would have been the stars and the flickering glow of the temple fires burning at the tops of nearby pyramids. ‘All I could see was someone moving in the same direction as I was. I remember wondering if he was going to cross the bridge in front of me — then he did!’ I heard the man swallow nervously. ‘I was so frightened I couldn’t even run. I just watched him staggering across that little wooden bridge — I don’t know if he was drunk but he was definitely unsteady on his feet — and the next thing I knew, I was face to face with a god!’