Gods and Pawns (20 page)

Nobody in the breakfast room; nobody in the living room except the Virgin of Guadalupe on the mantel, surrounded by votive candles. When Maria turned off the light, the room was bathed in a serene pink gloom, pulsing with the candle flames.

She finished her coffee, made her preparations, and returned to sit in the living room. She clutched the big teddy bear from Kmart. She waited, as the hours went by, watching the front door.

When she heard him coming up the walk at last, she tensed. He was shuffling, taking careful small steps, and there was an additional
tap-tap-tap
that suggested…a cane?

Maria couldn’t look away from the door.

He was taking the stairs one step at a time. Why so slowly? Had he been injured? But he got to the door at last, and she heard the key going into the lock—so quiet, so careful. Had Tina given him a key?
Click
, and the door opened.

Maria’s eyes widened. She held the bear tightly.

The figure came across the threshold, walking a little bent over, indeed using a cane. Maria waited until he was a body’s length into the room before she fired.

The teddy bear worked admirably as a silencer, with a little flurry of kapok puffing out—her shot made not much more noise than if she’d dropped a book on the floor—but she did not hit her target. Nor did her shot go wild. It smacked neatly into the wall just where her visitor had been standing a microsecond before; and if he had been a human being, he’d have been killed.

“Don’t shoot!” he hissed.

Maria threw the bear aside and got to her feet. She trained the gun on him.

“So, it’s you?” she said. “Tell me, how are things in the Land of the Dead?”

“Put the gun down,
mi hija
,” said Uncle Porfirio.

Maria lowered the gun reluctantly, staring at him. By the wavering candlelight she saw a gaunt, wrinkled old man with a mane of white hair, leaning on his cane.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I owed you an explanation,” he said, in a dry old husk of a voice. “All those years ago, I had to disappear, Maria. We were working in a joint operation with the CIA. Do you know what deep cover means?”

“I know what bullshit means,” said Maria, and she reached out and seized a handful of his white hair. One quick tug and the wig came off, revealing the slicked black hair beneath.

Uncle Porfirio sighed. He rose slowly from his bent stance, stood straight as a sword. Reaching into his pocket, he drew out a handkerchief and wiped the wrinkles from his face, the gray from his mustache.

“Damn,” he said quietly.

“Yeah. Damn,” Maria replied. “What the fuck are you?”

He gave her a severe look. “Don’t use that kind of language,
mi hija.
Do you want to sound like a whore?”

She had to fight hysterical laughter.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not eleven years old anymore. Even if
you
haven’t aged a day, everything else has gone to hell. Me included.”

They regarded each other a long moment.

“You’re not screaming, anyway,” said Uncle Porfirio. “I guess that’s a good sign. How much have you figured out?”

“That there’s some kind of secret group that knows what’s going to become rare and valuable, and figured out how to hide it all away until it
is
valuable,” said Maria. “So either they’ve got a time machine or they’ve been around for hundreds of years. In which case they’re probably running governments secretly, the way people used to say the Freemasons did. And they’ve definitely got immortal people to work for them. Are you a vampire or something?”

Uncle Porfirio scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous. Vampires don’t exist.”

“That’s nice.”

“I’m just a cyborg.”

“Oh, is that all?” Maria very nearly lost it this time. “Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that movie?”

“Sort of.”

“Only you’re not from the future. You’ve been around a loooong time. I’ll bet you worked on a certain ranch in Durango, didn’t you? The only part I couldn’t figure out was your connection with the other cyborg guy, the bastard who killed Papi.” Maria’s fist clenched on the gun.

Uncle Porfirio glanced sidelong at the porch. “I’m not working with him,
mi hija.
Let me close and lock the door, okay? And then maybe I can make some fresh coffee. This is going to take a while to explain, and I don’t know how much time we have.”

“He’s coming for me tonight, isn’t he?”

Uncle Porfirio shook his head.

“He’s coming here, probably, but he’s coming for me. That was the whole point of this stupid game.”

In the kitchen, it was almost possible to believe that it was still 1956, that everything was still normal and right with the world. Uncle Porfirio hung up his coat on the old bent nail by the door—yes, he still wore his under-arm holster—and made fresh coffee in the same blue graniteware pot that had been sitting on the back of the stove the last time he had walked out of the kitchen, thirty-five years earlier. Maria, accepting a cup from him, felt weirdly peaceful.

“Why did you go away?” she asked.

“It wasn’t my choice, honey,” he said, sitting down across the table from her. “I had to go do something somewhere else for a while, for the Company. The people I work for.”

“You know what happened, once you were gone,” Maria said.

“I know.” He looked bleak. “Nothing I could do.”

“And you’re not only not really my uncle, you’re sure as hell not Papi’s cousin. You’re not even remotely related to my family, are you?”

“Oh, yes, I am,” he said, raising his eyes to hers. Black eyes, fathomless as the shaft of a well. And as cold…or so she had thought, when she had been a little girl. Now she recognized something of the darkness she saw in her own mirror. Not coldness: resignation. And, perhaps, the hardness of anthracite coal.

“A long time ago,
mi hija
, there was a city on the waters of a lake. It was a beautiful place, or so I always heard; I never saw it with my own eyes. It had bridges and causeways. It had gleaming white towers that shone like pearls in the evening light, and canoes went back and forth across the water loaded with jade, and gold, and chocolate. It was a good place to live, cleaner than any city in Europe. Prosperous, too. Beyond the lake were green fields of corn and blue fields of maguey, stretching to the horizon, and wide straight roads leading away to all the lands the people of the city had conquered.

“And that was the worm in the apple,
mi hija,
or I guess you could say the worm in the maguey.

“They had two problems. The first was that, a few generations before I was born, some priest had come up with the idea that blood sacrifice was the only way to keep the universe from flying into a million pieces. Human blood had to be splashed on the altars of the gods, every day; human blood had to be smeared on the clothes and in the hair of the priests. The cities were white as pearls, clean and pretty, yes, but the insides of the temple were caked with blood and black with crawling flies. That was the price they had to pay.

“And where was all that blood going to come from? The only way to get it was to conquer other cities, for captives to sacrifice. And, once you sacrifice captives, why waste all that fresh meat? So all their neighbors hated them.

“Their other problem was that their Emperor was a frightened man.

“In the previous cycle of time, a god with skin white as the bones of the dead had ruled the world. One day he had sailed away, into the sunrise; but when he came back, he would begin a new cycle. The clock had been ticking for years, and it was this Emperor’s bad luck that it was due to strike in his lifetime. The end of the world was coming. He knew it; he knew the day and the hour, and knew there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

“So the day came at last, and Hernando Cortés rode into Tenochtitlan with his army. It’s not true that he conquered Mexico with a handful of Spaniards. He had help from nearly every tribe he met along the way. That’s what happens when you eat your neighbors.

“One of the things the Emperor did, to try and placate Cortés, was to offer a household of high-born ladies to be the wives of his captains. All of them were the daughters of chiefs. Some of them were the Emperor’s sisters, and cousins. One of them was my mother. Your grandmother of a dozen generations,
mi hija.

“My father was a captain of Spain, and he might have been a mercenary lusting after gold, or he might have been a noble soldier for the Cross. Maybe both. All I remember was that he was big and strong, and his helmet shone in the sunlight. He was good to my mother. She loved him enough to stay with him, even after those white towers fell and the magic lake became a cracked dry bed of dust. When he marched away into the jungle, looking for something else to conquer, she followed him.

“And after a while, she carried a baby in a cotton sling on her back; and after a while, she led a little boy by the hand, while the new baby slept in the cotton sling.

“I remember the red dust of the trails, the green lizards, the black condors circling high against the blue. I remember the fire at night, when my mother told me about Tenochtitlan, and why I must never forget it, though it didn’t exist anymore.

“My father told me all about Spain, and Jesus Christ, and how He gave Himself to be sacrificed, because the old God required shed blood.

“Somehow or other I got them confused in my mind, Spain and Tenochtitlan, both of them with priests in black offering blood that ran down in streams. Even my mother had come to confuse Christ and Montezuma, maybe; both of them thin sad men, knowing they were going to die so a new age could be born.

“One day, when I was about four, we captured a city. It wasn’t so big and beautiful as Tenochtitlan, but it put up more of a fight. My father must have lost most of his army, taking it. He held it for a week before it was taken back.

“We hid in a palace, away from all the fire and smoke and noise. My father was carried in, and I don’t know if he was dead or dying; my mother screamed over him and kissed his bleeding face. What happened next, I’m not sure, but it seemed as though his soldiers thought that if his body was propped up, if his sword was put in his dead hand, the enemy would think he was immortal and would turn and run. So my mother helped them drag him outside. I never saw her again.

“But before she went away, my mother told me to look after my little brother.

“It’s important you understand that,
mi hija.

“Now, my mother had a servant who had followed her from Tenochtitlan, a clever little lady named Tonantzin, who walked as soundlessly as a jaguar. I was scared and crying, holding on to baby Agustin, when I looked up and noticed her standing there. My mother had left the door barred, but she had gotten in somehow.

“Tonantzin said she had come to rescue me, and I must go away with her as fast as I could run. I told her I couldn’t run fast, carrying the baby. She said the baby would have to be left behind. Tonantzin caught my wrist, to pull me away, but I wouldn’t let go of Agustin. So in the end she grabbed us both in one armful, and we left the room by a secret way.

“That old palace had a passage in it that ran down under the rocks, an echoing tunnel. After a long way it opened on a river, where a canoe had been drawn up as though waiting for us. Tonantzin set us safe inside and rowed us away fast. I remember the jade green river with the dragonflies zipping to and fro as her paddle dipped in the water. It was all calm and quiet, because the river carried us far away from the battle. You wouldn’t think the world had ended at all. Agustin stopped crying and fell asleep, rocked by the water.

“Then the lady Tonantzin told me a story,
mi hija.

“She said that a god named Time Crow had once ruled the world, and he had been as bloody and terrible as the old priests. But he knew that when the next cycle of years came, his wife would bear a son who would sacrifice his father. And this god Time Crow was not as wise as Montezuma. He thought he could cheat fate. So, every time his wife had a baby, he’d eat it, just as the priests used to do. He did this eleven times.

“But his wife thought of a way to trick him. When the twelfth baby was born, she dressed a lump of jade like an infant and presented it to Time Crow. He was in such a hurry to eat his son that he just gulped it down, and never realized he had been tricked. The real baby was sent away to a safe place, and grew up into a mighty warrior called Lightning Bolt. This Lightning Bolt came back and overthrew his father Time Crow, and sacrificed him. When he cut the body open, out came all eleven of Lightning Bolt’s brothers and sisters, miraculously brought back to life, though they had been dead.

“And Lightning Bolt’s brothers and sisters were so grateful to be rescued that they made him their Emperor, even though he was the last-born.

“Tonantzin told me all this story was true, that Lightning Bolt was her Emperor, too. He had the power to raise the dead, and make people live forever, because he had become the master of the cycles of time. She said I could become his servant and live forever, if I wanted. I thought this was a good idea, so I said yes. It never occurred to me that she wasn’t making the offer to both of us, Agustin and I.

“I went to sleep, and when I woke up, we were on the riverbank and the biggest dragonfly I had ever seen was sitting there on the mud, with its wings beating loud. It shone like polished jade. Warriors took us from the boat and loaded us into the dragonfly’s head. We flew away across the jungle to the home of the gods.

“It was a beautiful place of gardens and pyramids, but that was where I lost Agustin. They took him away from me when I was asleep. It was years before I found him again. By that time I was immortal.”

“But there aren’t really any gods,” said Maria.

Uncle Porfirio shook his head, looking tired.

“Here’s where your secret brotherhood comes in.

“Way up in the future, a big corporation will figure out time travel. They won’t be able to do much with it, because it’s impossible to change history, and it’s impossible to go anywhere but the past. So, no winning Lotto numbers from next week, you see?