Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 775 & 776, March/April 2006

The Coming of the Gods by Simon Levack

Simon Levack’s first novel, Demon of the Air, received the 2004 Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger Award in Britain, where it was first published. The book appeared in the U.S. in 2005 (from St. Martin’s) to a starred review from PW that said: “Historical novels... don’t get much better than Levack’s outstanding effort, set in the heydey of the Aztec empire.” The series continues in this story, and in two more novels soon to see print in the U.S.

The Keeper of the God of the Aztecs was dead. The first thing I noticed when I entered the sanctuary was the old priest’s body, sprawled on the stone floor. Even in the darkness of the shrine, through the thick, incense-laden air, no one could have mistaken him for a sleeping man: not with his arms flung out as they were, and his hands balled into tight fists.

I swallowed nervously and glanced over my shoulder, towards the shrine’s entrance and the outside world, where more of my fellow priests were standing, black cloaks wrapped around them against the cold night air. They were waiting for an announcement. They had been waiting for it for too long already, and had sent me, the most junior among them, into the temple’s inner sanctum to find out what had become of the old man and when the tidings he was expected to bring would arrive. What was I to tell them now, I wondered?

It was the night of the Coming of the Gods: the night when the terrifying, capricious beings who ruled the Earth, the Heavens, and the Land of the Dead came among us; the night when, assuming they chose to, they might reassure us, their puny creations, that they had not forgotten about us altogether.

Naturally, the first of the gods to arrive was always the youngest, the quickest: Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror. His appearance would herald the arrival of the rest and signal the true start of the festival. There would follow an orgy of drinking, singing, and dancing, culminating in the Fire Sacrifice, when captive enemy warriors would be thrown alive into the fire. Their roasted flesh and blistered skin would remind the oldest god, the God of the Hearth, what was required of him.

If it were not for the festival and the sacrifice, the oldest god might desert us, and if he did, our food would not cook and our fires would give neither warmth nor light. We Aztecs would both freeze and starve, and the precarious lives we led high up among the mountains would end. Yet the festival could not start until Tezcatlipoca had appeared and his coming had been announced: That was how important the old priest’s mission had been. Many times that night he had looked into the shrine, hoping to report a sign of the god’s presence. The last time he had not come out again.

Beyond the prone body, wreathed in dense, sweet-smelling smoke from the brazier at the shrine’s entrance, was the figure of the god himself: Tezcatlipoca, recognisable by the horizontal bars of black and blue that divided his face and the polished obsidian scrying glass dangling on a cord from his right hand. My eyes were drawn to this object for a moment, as though the mysterious shapes that always lurked in the dark mirror’s murky depths might offer some clue to what had happened to the old priest.

There was nothing there. Nonetheless, I stared at the glass for a long moment, vaguely troubled by it. It seemed to sway, as though someone had just disturbed it, but it was hard to be sure in the smoky gloom. There had been something else wrong, I was sure; but the thought fled from me faster than I could pin it down, and I turned away from the idol towards the thing that had held the old priest’s attention for most of the night.

It lay in the centre of a reed mat: a large, round, flat cake of cornmeal. There was a single deep indentation on its surface, not far from the edge. I gasped when I recognised its shape for what it was: that of a foot.

The god had arrived.

The cake of cornmeal was there to trap the gods. The lure was a wooden bowl full of dough balls placed by the reed mat. In coming for his offering, the god would tread on the cake, betraying himself by his footprint.

This was what the old man had come here to see, and to announce, but it looked as though he had been struck down just as his task was about to be accomplished.

An unpleasant idea struck me. I hesitated to follow it up: I did not want to think about what it might mean if I were right. But curiosity got the better of me, and even while I was telling myself not to bother, I was kneeling over the body, gently rolling it over until the sightless eyes stared up into my own.

I knew what I was looking at just as surely as I knew the feeling that gripped me, because they were both the same thing: pure terror.

As a novice priest, I had been made to go out by night into the hills armed only with a conch-shell trumpet, a bundle of reeds for burning, and a bowl full of incense, to confront the spirits that haunted the darkness. I had felt the chill of my fear blend with the bitter cold of the mountain air until there was no telling them apart. I knew that feeling now, and I recognised it in the face of the dead man below me. I had seen it in the faces of men about to die: the staring eyes, the lips drawn back from the teeth; and had the man’s hair been white before he entered the shrine?

“You saw him, didn’t you?” My whispering voice shook as violently as my fingers. I glanced nervously over my shoulder, half expecting to see the god standing over me, poised to strike and cast me into the Land of the Dead, where the echoes of his curse would mock me forever as I huddled vainly against the obsidian-bladed winds.

The god sat in place, however, still wreathed in curling smoke, the scrying glass still dangling from his fist.

I was sure the old man had died of fright. Yet apart from that footprint in the cornmeal, there was nothing amiss that I could see. There was just the troubling, indefinable thing I had noticed in that obsidian mirror; that, and something in the way the god’s pale eyes glittered when they stared back into mine, something more than usually intense in their malevolent intelligence.

I got it then.

Slowly, I stood up and stepped over to the man-sized statue at the end of the room. I stood before it, motionless, for a moment, with my gaze fixed on the flawless disc of black glass, watching it turn slowly among the tendrils of smoke curling lazily in the still air. Then, slowly and delicately, I reached out, eased the mirror from the warm, unresisting fingers of the god’s right hand, and placed it in his left.

He grasped the cord, clutching it spasmodically, but made no other sound or movement.

“Nice try,” I muttered. I looked at the body on the ground beside me. “It’s a very convincing disguise, apart from forgetting which hand the Smoking Mirror holds his glass in. But it was a mean trick to play on the old boy, wasn’t it?”

The statue spoke, at last. “I only wanted to give him a fright. In return for all the beatings he’s given me in the priest house... You know what I mean.” I did: They did not call the place where we were trained the House of Tears for nothing. “How could I know that would happen?” He was a very young man, his voice scarcely broken. I recognised it.

“You’re Yaotl, aren’t you?” He was a novice, a clever boy, I recalled, and very unusual for a priest in having been born a commoner. This did not endear him to many of his elders, and the Keeper of the God in particular had loathed him. But what a desperate, dangerous thing to do!

Now that he had nerved himself to speak, his whole body was shivering violently. “I hid in the alcove, behind the idol, at dusk. Then the last time he went out I pushed the god back and took his place. It wasn’t hard, he’s only made of wood, and in the darkness and smoke in here I didn’t think anyone would notice...”

“And then you planted your foot in the cornmeal before his very eyes.” I stared at the reed mat. The youth’s audacity amazed me: It would have been easier to believe a god had made that footprint.

But then, as I listened to the tremor in the boy’s breathing, I found myself wondering how much it really mattered. The gods use men as their instruments; if they picked out a foolish, tormented youngster and a vicious old bully of a priest, then who was I to question their choice?

“Just see that you put that idol back quick,” I snarled, as I stepped out into the night.

“The Lord has deigned to come!” I cried, and the joyful shout was taken up: “The gods have arrived!”