Shadow of the Lords

4

A snake danced in front of me. It was not the venomous kind. When it raised its broad, flat head and opened its mouth to send its tongue darting silently towards my face, I saw no fangs. It was the sort that killed its victim slowly, squeezing until he could not draw breath, until ribs cracked and organs split and burst. With every movement I made, I knew its grip would tighten further. I kept as still as I could, taking short, shallow breaths until the strain on my lungs and the sensation in my head, a feeling that it was whirling and rocking even while the rest of me was pinned to the ground, became too much and I gasped and coughed.

The snake did not react. Its eyes watched mine. As I gazed into them I realized that they looked wrong: their pupils were not thin elliptical slits but perfectly round black beads and their irises were a warm brown that I knew from somewhere.

I kept my eyes on the snake’s because I could not look at the flickering light that illuminated them. It seemed to swing back and forth like a censer in the hands of a priest, looming towards me until it threatened to fill my head up and then shrinking to a shimmering point the size of a star.

I could hear a voice. It seemed to come from far away and I was not sure whether it was uttering words or inarticulate cries. The sound was so faint that when it stopped I could notdecide whether I had really heard it, but when it resumed, the snake seemed to respond to it.

‘Can you hear us?’

I blinked. My eyes were shimmering, misty. It was becoming harder to focus on the creature’s face, on those unsettling eyes, the scales that glistened where they caught the light, the lipless smirk on its mouth. I shut my eyes but somehow the snake was still there, its head now moving from side to side in a slow, sinuous dance. I felt its coils moving over my body, and terror convulsed me, making my hands clench and snatching my head up off the floor, but the choking, suffocating pressure did not come. I lay still again, wondering at the sensuous caress of the snake’s skin against mine, its tongue flickering over my throat and chest.

It reared up then, as if to strike.

‘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 Quetzalcoatl: 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.

As he knelt over me, reaching towards me with the knife, Icould not have found my voice even if I had wanted to. I merely lay trembling silently as he tugged at the ropes that bound me, slicing them cleanly one by one until I was free.

He straightened, but put his empty hand on my chest, pressing gently but firmly in a gesture that meant I must not get up. He might have spared himself the trouble: my limbs were too numb and leaden to move.

Against the light there was less expression than ever in the serpent mask, but something told me that the mind behind it was troubled and perplexed, as though he had come across something unexpected and could not decide what to do about it.

In the end he mumbled: ‘Why are you here?’

His voice sounded as though it were coming from the bottom of a clay pot. It also sounded young, but then I supposed gods were ageless.

I felt compelled to answer. ‘I …’

‘Quietly!’ he hissed. ‘She’ll hear you!’

His warning had come too late.

Something stirred at the far end of the room. A sound like a yawn came to us, and then her shape appeared, uncurling itself from where she had lain, rising and stretching as naturally and gracefully as a jaguar waking from its midday nap, while the shadow cast by the wavering torchlight on the wall behind her danced suggestively.

Quetzalcoatl was on his feet in an instant, turning with a rustle of feathers and a tiny grating noise from the heels of his sandals.

‘You’re back at last!’ Hearing her speak was like having my ears stroked with down. Her voice was soft and seductive, but there was something about it, some quality or feeling or memory it evoked, which made me shiver. She walked towards the god with her arms outstretched, and in the instantwhen the light fell directly across her body I saw that she was naked.

‘Come here,’ she said huskily.

In the instant he saw the woman Quetzalcoatl had seemed rooted to the floor. As her fingers stretched towards him, their tips brushing the hard skin of his jewelled mask, he seemed to waken. With a muffled cry he threw his arms out in front of him as if to push her away. He stepped back. The sole of one sandal trampled my ankle. I howled in pain and the god nearly fell over me. He stumbled, caught himself in time and backed towards the doorway.

‘What’s the matter?’ cried the woman. ‘Don’t you want to … Come back!’

He blundered into the edge of the doorway. For a moment he seemed a blind, billowing confusion of cloth and feathers and sparkling jewels, and then he was gone, his inarticulate cries echoing around the courtyard.

‘Wait!’ she screamed. Still naked, she ran after him. ‘Don’t go! Tell me what’s wrong!’

I forced myself to raise my head so that my ears could track her voice through the courtyard, and beyond it. I heard it dip as she ran through the other room and rise again as she reached the street outside, and I marvelled at how shrill and ugly it sounded, and how desperate she must have been to have run clear out of the house without anything on.

My head started to spin. I forced myself to concentrate, thinking I had to stay awake, I had to get up and get away before the woman came back, but the pain and the sick feeling were too strong for me, and I blacked out.