Song of the Risen God Page 8

  “And I need not search to determine if what he tells me is truth or falsehood,” Pixquicauh added. “He has no place to hide from me. If he thinks to deceive in his answers, then I hear him thinking that.”

  “So you need to hang him on hooks?”

  “The torment weakens him. It makes my task easier. Does that bother you, great Tuolonatl? To learn that the edicts of Scathmizzane are made easier?”

  The woman scowled and, in that pose, wrinkles showed about her eyes and tightened lips, a reminder of her age. Few would think her near to fifty, Pixquicauh realized more fully, when he looked upon that scowl. Her muscles remained firm, her movements full of the grace associated with youth, her hair still thick, her face still carrying a measure of youthful luster and innocence, despite the indisputable fact that this woman had slain scores of enemies.

  “It is curious to me that you care so deeply,” he said. “Are the tales of your bloody macana untrue? Is the pile of javelins celebrating the kills of Tuolonatl an exaggeration?”

  “You will not bait me, High Priest,” she said. “We together serve Scathmizzane, the Glorious Gold, the God King who rides Kithkukulikhan. By his blessing are we given our place.”

  “Then you should remember yours, and remember mine,” Pixquicauh scolded, hardly believing her claim of devotion. “I will empty the human, the child of Cizinfozza, and when I am done with him, I will sacrifice him, that his spirit may feed the power of Scathmizzane.” He led the woman’s gaze to the north, to the rim of the chasm that held the sacred xoconai city of Otontotomi, now reclaimed from the waters that had covered it for centuries. The xoconai had taken hundreds of prisoners, and now they worked, cleaning the stairs and removing the sediment that had settled on the structures, repairing the buildings, polishing the gold.

  Thousands of xoconai worked, too, but not like the slave humans, their every wrong move responded to with the crack of a whip.

  “They will be worked to their deaths,” he told Tuolonatl, savoring every word because he sensed that the notion bothered her more than a little. Pixquicauh enjoyed Tuolonatl’s apparent weakness, as it reinforced his own belief and desire that he, not she, was the prime subject of Scathmizzane’s court. “And their spirits will be summoned up the slopes of Tzatzini to the crystal symbol of Glorious Gold, and there the humans’ own sisters, once their witches, will usher them to the belly of Scathmizzane. Their bodies will be broken in life, their souls will be eaten in death. Does this bother you?”

  “It is not just the souls of the humans,” she whispered in reply.

  It was true enough, Pixquicauh, of course, knew. The xoconai who had fallen in the fight were also given to Scathmizzane, of course!

  “I cannot imagine a more glorious service to the God King,” he said. He added, in a tone heavily edged in accusation, “Can you?”

  Tuolonatl didn’t respond, and the old augur could see the conflict within her. She wasn’t going to speak out against the edicts of Scathmizzane, but they horrified her. The passage from life to death and from death to ingestion by their God King was something that many people could think about positively only when it was a distant prayer.

  Now that prayer had become reality, brutal reality, and for people like Tuolonatl, for all of her battle prowess and ferocity, witnessing that glorious truth was no easy spectacle.

  The old augur smiled but did well to suppress his laughter. She couldn’t answer him—what could she say?

  He was the chosen of Scathmizzane. She was being used as the tip of Scathmizzane’s spear. Would she even survive the war?

  Pixquicauh hoped she would not.

  * * *

  Tuolonatl lingered about the long stairway leading down the gorge that housed the ancient xoconai city of Otontotomi. In only a couple of days, the work down below was beginning to show remarkable process. The xoconai had several hundred slaves, but it was more due to the efforts of the forty thousand xoconai warriors working tirelessly to reclaim the beauty and grandeur of Otontotomi.

  And working, too, to quickly make the city self-supporting, the most critical factor if the xoconai were to press eastward. Right down along this staircase of more than two thousand steps before her, Tuolonatl saw the progress: the stairs fully cleared and squared, the temporary rope railings already in place, with more permanent safeguards already under construction.

  For all her misgivings expressed to the high priest, the xoconai cochcal could not help being prideful and pleased by the discipline of her forces. Far down the staircase, three large boats descended. The xoconai were assembling and organizing a fleet from the craft procured from the lake towns. The next morning would see many fishing boats on the new lake, and others sailing to the banks to map and note the currents and winds.

  Already. In just a couple of days.

  Tuolonatl signaled to one of her attendants, who rushed over with her cuetzpali, the reptilian mount, already saddled and waiting. She noted that the young woman handler seemed quite eager here, as if she knew something Tuolonatl did not.

  Tuolonatl hopped into her seat gracefully and sent the lizard running down the long staircase. She wasn’t fond of riding these collared lizards, with their side-to-side swaying, but she had to admit that, in going downhill, particularly in a steep decline along steps such as these, the lizards, with their low center and sticky padded feet, were much handier than horses.

  Her handler followed close behind on a second mount, with a horn in hand, one she blew whenever they neared someone lower on the stairs. Without hesitation, those xoconai, even the teams handling the heavy and awkward boats, rushed aside to let the great Tuolonatl pass unhindered—after all, any little thing she needed to do was far more important than anything they might do.

  The day was warm, the sun bright, and the lizard’s energy levels high, so the great mundunugu warrior made the floor of the chasm in short order. She headed for the massive central pyramid of Otontotomi, part temple, part city hall, where both the high priest and the city sovereign of this recovered city, if one was appointed, would reside and hold court. Tuolonatl suspected that Scathmizzane himself would take his place within.

  “Great cochcal, pray hold,” the handler behind Tuolonatl said, surprising her. She pulled up the reins, drawing a hiss from the cuetzpali, and swung about in her seat to note the trailing rider, who directed her gaze to a sand mound beside another of the structures, which had nearly been reclaimed.

  Tuolonatl didn’t understand the significance at first, until a handsome young mundunugu walked out around that mound, one whom Tuolonatl surely recognized.

  She began to hail Ataquixt, the man she had named as her lead scout, a man she had come to consider a friend and, if she managed to find her way, a lover, too. Before she got the name out, though, Ataquixt tugged on a bridle he held, and from around the mound of sand came another dear friend, perhaps Tuolonatl’s dearest friend of all.

  “Pocheoya,” the woman said, bursting into a happy giggle at the sight of the brown and white, blue-eyed pinto horse, its proud brown shield patch covering the muscled chest. Pocheoya was not tall, not fifteen hands, even, but could run with the finest horses of Tonoloya. And, low to the ground and so very strong, Pocheoya could outmaneuver and outmuscle any in the barrel races, when guided by the skilled hand of Tuolonatl.

  In contrast to any other horse she had known, and certainly compared to the stupid cuetzpali lizards, Tuolonatl never felt as if she was Pocheoya’s master. When she was on this one’s broad back, they were more than master and beast, more than a team, even. It was almost as if they became a singular being, each understanding the other so very well.

  “How did you get him down that mountain and to Otontotomi so quickly?” she asked Ataquixt as he approached with the horse. Tuolonatl handed him her cuetzpali’s reins as he handed Pocheoya’s to her.

  “I knew you wanted him,” Ataquixt answered, smiling, seeming quite happy at giving Tuolonatl such obvious pleasure.

  “Ataquixt was up all ni
ght and took great care in sneaking Pocheoya past you in the village at the rim,” the female attendant explained.

  Tuolonatl smiled warmly at her lead scout, who shrugged rather adorably, she thought. The woman’s gaze lingered longer than she intended, caught by the beauty of Ataquixt’s face. There was something about it, she thought, about the way the colors mixed. His nose was bright red, but not near the base. There it faded to pink, and then to an almost yellowish small line before being met by the blue skin on either side. She imagined him lying on his side in the early morning, looking back at her, and she thought that his face, either half, might resemble the softening colors of sunrise or sunset.

  His colorful face softened in the morning light, he would be quite beautiful.

  There was something else, too, that had her studying this young warrior. He had expressed such eagerness for the war, shouting encouragement to the other scouts, promising glory, but Tuolonatl sensed a conflict within him, as within herself. She had no doubt that the eastward march of the xoconai would better the world, but she was not eager for the puddles of blood through which they would march.

  She wondered if the same reservations niggled at Ataquixt.

  Ataquixt offered his cupped hands to help Tuolonatl up into Pocheoya’s saddle, then moved over and climbed atop the cuetzpali she had been riding.

  “To canahuac?”

  Tuolonatl looked at him slyly. “Canahuac or tepachoni?” she asked. “Temple or governing hall?”

  “Canahuac,” Ataquixt said without hesitation. “Scathmizzane is there in the great pyramid. It is his place, and he fills it with his augurs. The sovereigns have not been invited, other than singular audiences at his demand.”

  Tuolonatl settled lower on Pocheoya, falling within herself as she tried to sort through the implications of Ataquixt’s revelation. She knew well from previous experiences that there would be a push-pull between the augurs and the more secular sovereigns who ruled the great cities of Tonoloya, for the goals of the augurs were often not in alignment with pragmatic governance. It made sense to her that the augurs would be gaining in this eternal struggle—their God King had come to them, after all—but hearing it so clearly now shook her more than she would have expected.

  “Perhaps we should go first to the ixnecia,” she said, turning her horse to the east, to face the great fissure that had been cut into the mountains.

  She started along the eastern-running boulevard at an easy pace, looking left and right with every stride to take in the progress of reclaiming the city, which was going on all about her. Still quite far away, though, Tuolonatl caught a flash of light from up high, on the right side of the ixnecia, then another, lower down, then responding flashes from the left wall of the giant fissure.

  She hadn’t been expecting the signals and so didn’t register them quickly enough to properly decode or even count the short and long flickers from the signal mirrors reflecting the sunlight, but she knew enough to realize that something important was going on over there.

  She urged Pocheoya into a trot, then a canter, the lizards of her two companions struggling to keep up.

  By the time they arrived, they found quite a gathering on the right-hand side of the mountain river that ran along the southeastern rim of the chasm, flowing out through the base of the ixnecia and into the great and wide lake beyond. The xoconai had already built a bridge over that river, but it wasn’t yet fortified or widened enough to bring a horse across. Tuolonatl dismounted and motioned for Ataquixt to join her and for the handler to hold the mounts.

  On the large, flat rock at the other side of the bridge, every xoconai bent the knee when they noted the identity of the woman hustling to join them.

  “What do we know?” Tuolonatl asked Zhorivemba, a veteran and scarred mundunugu she recognized as the leader of this company.

  He pointed out through the fissure and out over the lake to the northeast. “Runners,” he answered. “Children of Cizinfozza. A large band it would seem.”

  “How large?”

  “They are too far to know, Great Cochcal Tuolonatl,” Zhorivemba answered.

  “I would know.”

  Zhorivemba nodded. “I and mine will ride.” He began motioning to his commanders to gather the cuetzpali and form up.

  “It will take you days to catch them, if you can even quickly locate the trail they used to climb down from the plateau,” Tuolonatl said.

  “But we will catch them,” answered the man, who was about Tuolonatl’s age.

  Tuolonatl said, “No,” even as she tried to sort through this new development. For some reason, the idea of a mundunugu brigade charging out from the captured plateau seemed reckless to her. How far would they be from Otontotomi when they at last caught up to the fleeing humans? How far from supplies and reinforcements?

  “The humans are running in the belief that we are unstoppable,” she said, thinking out loud to draw the others into her planning. “In a matter of a day, all that they knew was swept from them, including the lake they thought of as their home. This is a good message to let them carry to the other villages, wherever those might be. Their fear will be our advantage.”

  “Then we will let some continue and only kill half,” Zhorivemba declared.

  His words sounded so wretchedly bloodthirsty to Tuolonatl, like a last and desperate attempt to allow him to cover his macana in blood, for no reason other than him wanting to do so.

  “No,” she stated again, and she glanced back to the southeast, to the great stair descending to Otontotomi, and to the captured boats being carried down.

  “We sail after them?” Ataquixt asked, noting her expression.

  Tuolonatl smiled. “Scare them, keep them running,” she reasoned. “Then track them secretly, from the shadows. Let them lead us to the next villages.”

  Ataquixt grinned widely. He hailed from the westernmost reaches of the xoconai nation, from a city that watched the sunset each night from the very edge of the great ocean. Tuolonatl knew this, of course.

  “You can sail by the stars,” she stated more than asked.

  “Here? On a calm lake beneath an open sky?” Ataquixt replied with a laugh.

  “One ship, thirty warriors, no cuetzpali,” Tuolonatl told him, but then she quickly corrected herself. “One cuetzpali. Only one, for my trusted scout alone.”

  Ataquixt nodded solemnly. He wasn’t simply leading the mission; he would be the mundunugu entrusted with guiding the next march of the xoconai. As he had led them here, to Tzatzini and Otontotomi, so too would his eyes guide them eastward, ever eastward, until they watched the sun rise out of the other ocean. Ataquixt believed in the mission of a Greater Tonoloya. The xoconai were good, and they would bring light to the world. Though greatly skilled in battle, he didn’t enjoy the killing.

  “For a better world,” he reminded himself.

  That very sunset, the industrious xoconai had a boat settled upon the shores of the new lake, and the handpicked crew, all loyal to Tuolonatl, set off, sails wide and full of a favorable southeastern wind.

  Ataquixt remained at the prow, steering, peering, watching. He set others all about with long poles, feeling for the bottom, for the lake was not deep. This had been a desert only two days before, after all, and the deep, deep waters of what the humans had called Loch Beag had spread far and wide.

  But it was deep enough, and rocks large enough to threaten the boat were few and far between.

  The winds blew strong, the prow kicked up white spray, and soon after the night had passed its midpoint, the low light of a sheltered fire came into view.

  * * *

  Aoleyn stood by the lake, cloak wrapped tight about her, staring at the reflection of the stars in the mostly still water. She appreciated the power of that water. This had been a mostly flat desert of black sand and black stones, but the surge of water from the fissure, the tremendous force of the giant Loch Beag thundering down thousands of feet, had dug a hole and pushed and shoved the sand and stones in its
irresistible press. The shoreline all the way from the mountains was broken and uneven, with piled stones, water-plowed berms, and many areas of rivulets and small streams as the continuing flow from the fissure overfilled the new lake.

  “The wind is chill this night,” Bahdlahn noted when he caught up to Aoleyn, not long after.

  “Warmer than up above,” she replied, looking back to the west and the distant plateau, which was glowing with the fires of the invaders.

  “I have found a quiet place,” Bahdlahn softly added.

  Aoleyn noted the tremble and timidity in his voice, a bit of nervousness, which explained to her his subtle suggestion. A quiet place like the mountain ledge to which she had led him, not long ago, and where she had made love to him under a sky not so different than the one this night. It was the first time Bahdlahn had made love, and the first time for Aoleyn, too, for she could not—could never—consider what her husband had done to her on the day he had been killed by the demon fossa to be such.

  A pang of guilt struck Aoleyn. She had initiated the events of that night and had guided the innocent Bahdlahn through them. She had wanted to make love to him, because she did indeed care for him and because she needed to know what lovemaking, and not rape, would be like. And truly, Aoleyn had enjoyed that night, and she treasured the memory of it.

  But, to her surprise, Aoleyn didn’t want to repeat it.

  She loved Bahdlahn and treasured his friendship and wanted nothing but the very best for him in his journey from slave to free man.

  “We start this journey together,” she said to him, taking his hands in her own, “but we will not end up in the same place.”

  “You do’no know that,” he replied, and she gathered from his confident and reassuring tone that he wasn’t understanding her quite yet. “We may find a new place to live, to build new homes, all of us together.”

  “No, Bahdlahn,” the woman said softly. “You and I. You have so much to learn and to know and to grow. You have barely tasted freedom and what it is to be a man.”