War God: Nights of the Witch Page 27

Yet if either of these two were involved, then why was she being followed in such a cautious and secretive way? Just a scrape of a sandal on gravel every now and then, followed by nothing for ages but her own footsteps, the beat of her heart and the song of night insects. Mexica enforcers would have taken no such precautions. If her arrest or murder had been ordered, they’d come after her at the double and got the job done. They wouldn’t drag it out forever like this.

  Slowly Malinal began to convince herself that she must be imagining the whole thing – that the horrors she’d been through had made her see danger everywhere when in fact there was none. She flexed her shoulders under her heavy backpack and looked east towards the mountains, shivering at the thought of the cold she must endure as she crossed that high range, and at the splendid beauty of the moonlight on the snowcapped peaks of the two great volcanos.

  The Mexica, who could be strangely poetic and even romantic despite their bloodlust, believed that Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl had once been a handsome warrior and a beautiful young princess who were deeply in love. They had planned to wed against the wishes of Iztaccihuatl’s father, who sent Popocatépetl to war in Tlascala to delay the marriage and then falsely reported to his daughter that the young man had been killed in battle. The princess’s sorrow was so great that she fell mortally ill and died of a broken heart. Popocatépetl, on returning victorious to Tenochtitlan, went mad with grief, seized the body of his beloved and carried her off to the highlands, where he too died as he sat in watch over her. Moved by their tragic end, the gods turned the young lovers into mountains and covered them both with snow so their story would be remembered for ever – and indeed, Malinal thought, the white contours of Iztaccihuatl, gleaming in the moonlight, did resemble the form of a woman stretched out on her back, while it required only a slight leap of imagination to see the brooding hump of Popocatépetl as the hunched figure of the grief-stricken prince keeping vigil over her.

  Would she too die up there amongst the snows? For, in her desire to stay as far as possible from the Mexica on her way to the coast, in this mad quest that Tozi had set her on to seek out Quetzalcoatl, Malinal had chosen to avoid the easy and well-travelled thoroughfare used by the merchant caravans to carry the rich trade between Tenochtitlan and the Maya lowlands. Instead she would cross the mountain pass between Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl, within the encircled but still free state of Tlascala, and travel onwards to the Yucatán from there using side roads and byways.

  Not that her experiences in the fattening pens had given her any reason to expect help in Tlascala! But Malinal knew from bitter experience that female slaves were amongst the items most prized by Mexica merchants, and that a woman of her beauty, travelling alone, would be at great risk. Better to take her chances with the Tlascalans than end up a prisoner of the Mexica again before she got within a hundred miles of the coast.

  She was trying not to think about the even greater dangers that awaited her if she did get to the Yucatán and did succeed in making it all the way back to her home town of Potonchan – dangers posed by the Chontal Maya, her own people – when she heard a sudden rush of footsteps behind her and someone crashed hard into her back. She lost her balance and was knocked flat, just managing to get her hands under her to break her fall. A knee pinned her buttocks, long fingers snaked round her neck and a face was thrust down beside her own.

  Even before he spoke she recognised her attacker from the foul smell of his breath and the reek of blood in his hair. ‘You witch,’ snarled Ahuizotl. ‘You’ve ruined me. Now you’re going to die.’

  Pepillo couldn’t swim and had never had reason to learn, but now discovered an abject fear of drowning. Tumbling and choking in the flood, his mouth and nose full of seawater, he gasped for air as he surfaced and found he’d been sluiced completely clear of the stateroom and out onto the navigation deck which sloped to starboard, steep as a roof, awash with solid debris. The water was shallower here, no more than a couple of spans deep, but it rushed and foamed down the slope carrying him with it. He saw Cortés and Alaminos clinging for their lives to the whipstaff, felt hope and absurd gratitude when Cortés pulled a hand free to grab his sleeve, then terror as the sleeve ripped from his jacket.

  His helter-skelter plunge continued. Some large object slammed into his side and a barrel pitched by, rolling end over end, narrowly missing his head before crashing through the railings at the edge of the deck where the roaring flood poured back into the deep. Dazed, numbed, helpless to arrest his fall, Pepillo shot feet first through the jagged void the barrel had torn in the railings. He was swept over the streaming precipice, and had already consigned his soul to God, when a hand seized his hair in a firm, strong grip and jerked him to an abrupt halt. An instant later the careening ship righted itself, then tilted violently to port and spilled both him and his rescuer back across the deck where they ended up in a tangle of limbs, wrapped around the whipstaff at the feet of Cortés and Alaminos.

  A spasm shook Pepillo’s body and seawater spewed from his mouth. Lifting his head, he saw that the hand still locked in his hair belonged to Melchior. ‘Thank you,’ he tried to say as the older boy released him.

  ‘Don’t think this makes you my friend,’ coughed Melchior.

  With a vast creaking of timbers, the Santa María settled on an even keel, shook herself like a wet dog, and ploughed on before the raging wind through blasts of icy spume.

  Melchior jumped to his feet and Pepillo followed, though he felt sick and faint. Every part of his body, already battered and bruised from the beating Muñoz had given him, was filled with new pain from his fight with the sea.

  ‘Better get some rope and tie yourselves to a cleat, lads,’ Cortés advised cheerfully. ‘Looks like we’ve got a rough night ahead of us.’

  Shikotenka had to admit the Cuahchics were good. A hundred of them were running vanguard for the Mexica regiments and, despite the punishing terrain, they’d reduced the Tlascalan lead to less than three hundred paces. Some of them were armed with atlatls and knew how to use them, but so far none of their darts had hit their mark because they were climbing the steep flank of Iztaccihuatl and the gradient worked against them. That would change to the disadvantage of the Tlascalans when they came to a downslope, and Shikotenka knew they must cross three deep transverse gullies before reaching the pass.

  He took a long cool draught from his waterskin. Weariness was beginning to tell on him, to seep into his muscles and his bones, sapping his strength. It seemed he’d been running and fighting, running and fighting since the beginning of the world, and ten miles still lay ahead before they brought the Mexica to the killing ground.

  He reached a decision. Something had to be done about those Cuahchics.

  The mountainside was all loose gravel and boulders interspersed with ancient, crumbling lava flows, and as the squad beat their way up, he’d noticed how their sandals constantly set off avalanches of little stones. Might not a greater avalanche be started? Already the sky was lightening in the east, more of the features of the landscape were becoming apparent, and Shikotenka began to look around for something he could use.

  Malinal heard the hiss of Ahuizotl’s knife being drawn from its scabbard, and felt his fingers scrabble at her forehead and dig into her eyes as he jerked her head back to expose her throat to the blade. The thing she hated the most, after all she’d been through, was that she was to be slaughtered here on her belly like a deer in a huntsman’s trap and couldn’t even spit in her killer’s face as she died.

  She screamed with rage and defiance but the blow never came. Instead she heard a hard, hollow thump, like the sound a coconut makes when it falls from the tree, and Ahuizotl slumped forward over her with a terrible groan. Then someone she couldn’t see dragged his limp body to the side, not completely clear of her but enough so she could begin to squirm out from under his weight, and there was another hollow thump followed by a loud crack and a series of ugly, wet squelching sounds.

  As she sat up she saw t
he strangest thing – a hefty lump of rock seemingly moving by its own power, smashing repeatedly down on the high priest’s head. Then there was a shimmer in the air and Tozi, in her beggar’s clothes, became visible out of nothingness, and Malinal understood that she was the one who was making the rock move, gripping it tight between her two hands, stooping over Ahuizotl and pounding his brains to pulp. His evil face, turned sideways, was already barely recognisable, one eye hanging loose, his skull, crushed and deformed, leaking matter and blood.

  ‘Tozi,’ Malinal said after a few more moments of this. ‘I think he’s dead.’

  ‘Just making sure,’ her friend replied. ‘With people as beastly as this it always pays to be sure.’ She examined her handiwork, nodded with satisfaction and tossed the stone aside.

  ‘Thank the gods you came,’ said Malinal. She frowned. ‘But you faded for a long time and you didn’t get sick. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ve never felt better,’ said Tozi. She lowered her voice, a confidential tone: ‘I told you, Malinal. Hummingbird showed himself to me on the pyramid. He spoke to me, he touched me with his fire, and he made me strong.’

  Shikotenka had found what he was looking for – a group of large boulders, two as high as a man, three others almost equally massive, that had rolled together in a cluster from somewhere higher up the lava-strewn ribs of Iztaccihuatl.

  The squad had put on a sprint, opening up their three-hundred pace lead on the Cuahchics to somewhere closer to a thousand. Now they came to a halt, gathered in the shelter of the boulders, unslung their bows and looked down at their pursuers.

  Dawn was very close; with every minute that passed the sky grew brighter, revealing more of the long rugged slope below. They saw the Cuahchics moving fast, rapidly narrowing the gap again, and beneath them, spread out across the mountainside, the torches of the two pursuing regiments creating great pools of light, yellow and sulphurous as the fires of Mictlan. Some large groups of warriors were hard on the heels of the vanguard, others were as many as two thousand paces behind them, but all in all they were doing well, Shikotenka thought – well for Mexica, at any rate, who could not match the level of training in long-distance running that was so much a part of the Tlascalan way of life. As he’d expected, rage and the thirst for revenge were driving the mass of the soldiers on to feats that were really beyond their capacity. He smiled. That was good, very good, for it meant that many of them would be exhausted, some perhaps even too exhausted to fight, when they came to the killing ground.

  Tree and the ten most muscular members of the squad were already at work rocking and loosening the boulders as the Cuahchics below closed the distance to less than three hundred paces again. They threw an experimental volley of atlatl darts, all of which fell short – technically they were within range but, as with their earlier shots, the incline defeated them. The opposite was the case for the Tlascalan bows. On the flat, the range would still have been too great, but they had the advantage of targeting an enemy downslope and their first flight of a dozen arrows fell squarely amongst the Cuahchics, leaving three either dead on the ground or too badly injured to rise again and inflicting debilitating wounds on five more. A second volley was in the air before the first had struck and a third immediately followed, bringing the number of Cuahchics killed or injured to around thirty before they were at last near enough to unleash a storm of atlatl darts that flew true and forced the Tlascalan archers to duck for cover.

  ‘Now!’ Shikotenka yelled, and the archers downed bows and joined Tree and his men heaving at the boulders. Around eighty of the Cuahchics were still coming at them, bounding uphill in a concentrated mass, their glistening red and blue head-paint clearly visible in the rising light, their war cries exultant as they tasted victory. For a moment Shikotenka feared he’d miscalculated, until Tree, who had squatted low, his hands under the largest boulder, great cords of knotted muscle standing out on his shoulders and thighs, gave a roar of triumph. There was an explosive sound of rending and cracking and the huge rock broke away from its roots in the earth and went tumbling downslope in a tremendous cloud of dust and debris, closely followed by the other four which the squad had already loosened and which now required only a final heave to set in motion.

  The effects were stunning. As the avalanche crashed into them, the mass of the Cuahchics, uttering terrible screams, were mowed down – fifty or sixty of them dead in an instant, all the rest broken and scattered. Nor was that the end of the devastation, for the three biggest boulders were not stopped but only slowed by the multiple impacts and soon picked up speed again as they thundered onward, tumbling and bouncing high into the air before smashing into the much larger mass of warriors below and ploughing a deadly red swathe through their ranks before finally coming to a halt.

  When the dust settled, Shikotenka turned to Tree. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Three hundred, maybe four hundred?’

  ‘Maybe more,’ said Tree dourly. ‘But that still leaves fifteen and a half thousand of them on our tail.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Shikotenka. He looked up. Dawn had broken and, although it would not climb over the enormous shoulder of the volcano for another hour at least, the sun had already risen and was flooding the sky with light. A thousand paces above, the snowline glimmered and glittered. A thousand paces below, the furious cries of the Mexica rang out.

  A new vanguard was already streaming up towards them.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Shikotenka yelled. ‘No time to be standing around gawping.’

  ‘I know you told me,’ said Malinal, ‘but I didn’t understand you. I thought it was the terror we’ve been through that made you say that. I thought it was the pain. I didn’t think you meant it.’

  ‘I meant it,’ Tozi said gravely. ‘Hummingbird showed himself to me, and he spoke to me, and he’s as real as you and I are, Malinal. He’s – I don’t know – ugly and beautiful at the same time. He’s sly and stealthy and cruel and he touched me with his fire, but I didn’t understand what he’d done to me – I didn’t really understand – until I left you in the square at Tacuba and spotted Ahuizotl watching you from a corner. It was obvious he meant you harm, so I took a risk and tried a fade and nothing bad happened to me – nothing at all! It was easy to follow him, Malinal! I just waited for my chance … and … well, you saw the rest.’

  It was soon after dawn and the sun wasn’t hot yet, but clouds of fat blue flies were already buzzing industriously around the bloody ruin of the high priest’s head. Malinal felt a heavy sense of foreboding but decided not to speak of it.

  ‘My dear little Tozi,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘You’re really amazing, do you know that? You didn’t even embrace me when we parted in the square and yet here you are, as though by magic, saving my life again.’

  ‘I know you think it’s bad,’ Tozi said looking her in the eye, ‘that Hummingbird made me stronger.’

  ‘I don’t know what I think,’ Malinal admitted. ‘All I know is that I’m glad it’s me who’s alive and Ahuizotl who’s dead and not the other way round.’ Without another word she reached out and wrapped her arms round her strange friend, seeing the lice crawling in the beggar’s clothes she wore and not caring, just delighted to hold her close again and feel her warmth and sense her strange power.

  When they stepped apart, Malinal asked, ‘What now?’ But she already knew the answer.

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ Tozi confirmed. ‘You must go to the coast to find Quetzalcoatl and bring him to Tenochtitlan to end the rule of the Mexica.’

  ‘And you? Are you still determined to stay in that depraved city?’

  ‘Yes, that’s my part. I owe it to Coyotl.’

  ‘But it’s not safe there. You’ll never be safe!’

  Tozi smiled, a strange, lopsided smile. ‘I wasn’t much of a witch before, in the fattening pen, even though everyone believed I was, but I think I’ve become one now. I know how to look after myself.’

  They embraced again. ‘Very well,’ said Ma
linal. ‘I’ll see you in Tenochtitlan. I promise I’ll be back and, if Quetzalcoatl exists, I promise I’ll bring him.’

  ‘He exists,’ said Tozi. ‘He’s already crossing the eastern ocean. His boat moves by itself without paddles, just as the prophecy foretold. It’s all coming true, Malinal. Every word of it. You’ll see!’

  Shikotenka’s lungs were tortured, his muscles failing, his waterskin, which he’d replenished above the snowline, again nearly empty. His squad had already run many miles the previous evening, fought a hard fight in the pavilion and made a difficult escape. The only consolation was that the hundred highly trained Cuahchics who’d formed the new Mexica vanguard must be in equally bad shape – maybe worse. They’d left the camp in such a hurry that very few carried waterskins. Nonetheless, they’d pressed the Tlascalans hard in the hour after the avalanche, rarely trailing them by more than a thousand paces and several times drawing close enough in the rising daylight to harass them with atlatl darts. Shikotenka lost two more men that way, and another two had simply dropped with fatigue and were left to their fate while the rest of the squad struggled on.

  The punishment of the long run over mountainous terrain had slowed everyone – the Tlascalans, the Cuahchics and the two regiments following behind. The five thousand fastest Mexica were hot on the heels of the vanguard but the rest, numbering more than ten thousand, were now spread out over almost three miles of the rugged downslope on the east side of the pass between Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl. No one had any breath for war cries so there were no more furious hoots and whistles, just grim silence and the scrape and slide of feet.

  The dry scree of the pass was already giving way to bushes and greenery at these lower altitudes, and stands of trees, at first stunted but soon increasingly dense and tall, grew out of folds and gullies in the land. Shikotenka heard birdsong as he ran, a beautiful sweet melody, strangely at odds with the terrible business at hand, and he felt the fresh breath of the early morning on his face and the kiss of the rising sun.