Aztec Century (22 page)

Awake. I would stay awake. Fight the exhaustion I felt. They wouldn’t harm me, I was sure, but I had to remain vigilant. There couldn’t be too many hours left before dawn, so I didn’t have long to wait. If anyone tried to enter, I would jump up, scream, fight them with all the power I possessed. Awake. I would stay awake. That was my protection.

‘Good morning.’

I surfaced abruptly from a deep sleep. Pachtli was standing over me.

‘Here is some tea,’ he said, putting a silver tray down on the bedside table.

I sat up, still groggy with sleep. Pachtli switched off the lamp and threw open the curtains. Bright winter sunlight flooded in through the window.

‘It is a very pleasant morning,’ he remarked.

I kept the bedclothes drawn up to my neck; beneath them I was fully dressed.

‘Is Extepan here?’ I asked.

‘He arrived an hour ago.’

‘Why didn’t you wake me immediately?’

‘I explained to him that you were late in sleeping. He said that it was better to leave you for a while. He has been consulting with his generals.’

I was quietly angry. I wondered just how much he had told Extepan.

‘Where is he now?’

‘In the breakfast room, eating.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost ten o’clock.’

He made to pour the tea, but I said, ‘Leave it.’

As soon as he was gone, I rose and washed in the handbasin next to the bed. Changing into a roll-necked lambswool sweater and thick corduroys, I went downstairs.

Two guards were on duty at the breakfast-room door, but they let me through without a word. Extepan sat alone at a table in
front of the french windows, his back to me. His rust-coloured uniform had five eagle-heads on the epaulettes. He now held Chimalcoyotl’s former rank of
tlacateccatl
, ‘he who commands the warriors’.

I approached the table and said quietly in Nahuatl: ‘Good morning.’

He looked up from his omelette.

‘Catherine.’

A somewhat grave smile. He rose and embraced me formally.

‘How good it is to see you,’ he said in English. ‘A civilized face in an uncivilized world.’

A place had been laid opposite him. He motioned, and I sat down in it. A display screen stood in an alcove next to the table, showing bar charts and columns of data, all of a military nature. Extepan had a small control panel on his side plate.

The old woman entered and put an omelette down in front of me. There was a large plate of sliced ham at the centre of the table, garnished with chopped onions and beetroot.

‘I’m pleased you came,’ Extepan said. ‘Do you bring good news?’

Something told me he already knew of his son’s birth and Precious Cloud’s death.

‘You have a healthy baby boy,’ I said. ‘He was born ten days ago – no, eleven now.’

Extepan smiled. ‘And do we know if it was an auspicious day?’

‘Apparently so. According to the
tonalamatl
he’s destined to become a rich man.’

His smile became wry, and he nodded. ‘That is most encouraging. Even when we profess not to believe in them, good omens are as reassuring as bad ones are troubling.’

He speared a piece of ham and put it on his plate. There was grime under his fingernails, split skin on his knuckles. It was hard to look him in the face, to confront his candid eyes.

I babbled off the details of Cuauhtemoc’s weight, and of how he had announced his arrival in the world by urinating over a nurse. Extepan continued eating, glancing occasionally at the screen; but I knew his attention was fully engaged on what I was saying. I spoke of Precious Cloud’s labour, and of her wish to have me present during it.

I sensed him waiting until I had run dry. I hurried on. ‘Precious Cloud was delighted with Cuauhtemoc. But she wasn’t able to sleep after the birth.’

I allowed a pause. Finally he filled it. ‘And?’

‘She became distraught. She fell ill.’

He put his fork down.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘Everyone did what they could. She was tranquillized, and she seemed to improve. I took her riding one morning on Adamant. She galloped off unexpectedly, and I lost her. We found her hanging from a tree.’ I swallowed hard. ‘Your son is safe and well, but Precious Cloud is dead.’

He was silent for a long time. Although his expression did not alter, I knew he felt genuine sorrow. I was also certain he had already received the news.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I took her riding against Yeipanitl’s advice. I feel it’s my fault.’

He shook his head, slowly but emphatically. At the same time, his gaze was distant, as if I had faded out of both his sight and consciousness.

‘Of course you warned me,’ he said at length. ‘I should have taken better care of her. She was never happy in London.’

I made to say something, but he silenced me by raising a hand.

‘It was my responsibility, and I failed her.’ He sighed. ‘I never loved her, you see. But then you knew that, Catherine, didn’t you? My father says the best marriages are arranged on Earth rather than made in heaven, but he married my mother for love as well as diplomacy. Perhaps I would have been a better husband if I had been able to do the same.’

He was staring at the monitor as he spoke. After a silence, he said, ‘Who’s looking after my son?’

‘He’s with a wet-nurse. He’s very healthy.’

‘That’s welcome news, at least.’ He looked forlorn. ‘Thank you, Catherine. Thank you for coming all this way to bring the news personally. I attach no blame to anyone but myself.’

Unexpectedly, he put his hand on mine across the table. I almost flinched. I had been looking forward to seeing him until last night. Finding the corpse had changed everything.

The french windows looked out on a walled garden with fruit trees standing in ranks and an ice-locked ornamental pool.

‘Cherry trees,’ Extepan said. ‘Do you know Chekhov? I imagine the garden looks pretty when they flower. We tried to save as much of the city as possible, but it wasn’t easy.’

He was talking to cover his feelings, I knew.

Was the fighting fierce here?’

‘It’s been fierce everywhere. The Russians have proved formidable enemies. I’m beginning to understand what Wellington felt like during his march on Moscow.’

‘London’s rife with rumours. Particularly about Tsaritsyn What does a black star mean?’

He gave me a questioning look.

‘I found your rooms last night,’ I admitted. ‘There was a map With a black star over Tsaritsyn.’

He gazed out of the window. ‘Indeed. A black star, indeed.’

‘It’s common knowledge that something terrible happened there. But what?’

‘The Russians deployed a new weapon on the city.’

‘That’s also common knowledge. But what sort of weapon?’

He sighed. ‘A weapon of enormous destructive power. Two of our armies were wiped out at a stroke.’

The old woman approached. Extepan waved her away.

‘We tested a similar weapon ourselves many years ago,’ he went on. ‘Would you like to see the results?’

He pressed a sequence of buttons on the control panel. The screen went blank, then came alive again. It showed a grainy picture of a scrubby desert with a settlement of low whitewashed buildings at its centre. Extepan told me that the desert lay in the Cochimi Peninsula, whose long arm stretched down the Pacific Coast of north-west Mexico. A mock-up of a small city had been built there for the express purpose of testing the weapon and recording the results.

‘What sort of weapon is it?’ I asked again.

‘A bomb,’ he said simply. ‘Watch.’

Nothing happened on the screen at first. Only a long-winged bird drifted by overhead: there was no other movement. Then the whole desert erupted. The landscape bulged as if the earth had shrugged its sun-baked back, and a ball of fire and smoke
blossomed outwards and upwards, swallowing the buildings. There was a roar unlike any I had ever heard before.

The camera had been placed some distance from the explosion, but distance only emphasized its scale. The dome-shaped fireball swiftly rose upwards into a column which opened out so that it took on the appearance of a monstrous flat-topped tree. Massive dust clouds surrounded it, streaks of lightning flashed above it in the blue sky, and the whole picture flickered and rippled, as if the very fabric of landscape and sky was about to warp into something else. The settlement had been consumed within seconds by the fireball, and the terrible roaring went on and on like the rage of an awesome god who was the very apotheosis of destruction.

Abruptly Extepan blanked the screen. Everything went silent, but I could still hear the roar. I looked down at my untouched breakfast. For long moments the very idea of eating – of anything remotely involving the everyday behaviour of ordinary individuals – seemed fatuous in the face of what I had seen on the screen.

‘Tsaritsyn was destroyed by such a bomb,’ Extepan said softly. ‘Its power comes from the breakdown of unstable atoms. As you have seen, enormous amounts of energy are released as a result. The Russians used a small missile to carry their bomb to its target. Our armies had just taken the city, and they were annihilated – over three hundred thousand men. My brothers Chimalcoyotl and Ixtlilpopoca were among them.’

I wanted to say something, but nothing seemed adequate.

‘Not everyone died immediately in the blast,’ he went on. ‘It is a particular feature of such bombs that they release radiation which is invisible to the eye but lethal to the body. It rots the internal organs, causing a more lingering death, hours, days or even months later, and it can poison the earth for years.’

Everything about the bomb was already beyond my power to imagine. The sacrifice in the church seemed like a minor breach of etiquette by comparison.

‘The Russians have made it clear that they intend to use several more such bombs on cities in Western Europe unless we accept an immediate ceasefire on their terms. They have long-range missiles which could reach London.’

‘But you’ve tested similar bombs yourselves.’

‘As long ago as 1945.’

‘Then why haven’t you ever used them?’

‘Motecuhzoma forbade it. He and the
tlatocan
agreed that they were a dishonourable means of waging war, allowing the enemy no opportunity to display his valour and making territory uninhabitable.’

This was typically Aztec. Though they were technologically the most advanced nation on earth, their codes of conduct for warfare bordered on the quaint, harking back to the ritual imperatives of pre-Christian days.

‘Then surely the war in Russia is lost,’ I said. ‘Your armies can’t hope to prevail against weapons of that magnitude.’

‘That presumes we don’t have a weapon of similar effectiveness.’

In the garden, birds were hopping among the cherry trees. Drab brown sparrows, but the sight of them pleased me enormously.

‘We haven’t been idle in the intervening years,’ Extepan said. ‘Motecuhzoma anticipated the eventual development of the bomb by other nations, and he was concerned to see a weapon developed which could counter it. A weapon of similar destructive power, but without any lingering after-effects. Something that would kill quickly but cleanly. We’ve had such a weapon for several years.’

Evidently this was the ‘weapon more mighty than theirs’ to which Pachtli had referred. But I still didn’t understand.

‘Then why haven’t you used it before now?’

‘For the same reasons we didn’t use the bomb. It’s always been our principle to match ourselves with our enemies as equally as possible. What virtue is there in using a mountain to crush an ant? But the Russians have shown no reluctance to use their most powerful weapon, so now we may do the same.’

‘I can’t imagine anything as terrible.’

‘That’s because you can only think in terms of a bomb. Our weapon is equally effective but more accurate.’

‘Can it destroy a city at a stroke?’

He nodded. ‘But cleanly, and just as swiftly. Instant death, or none at all. For the moment, I can’t tell you any more about it.’

‘And you’ll be giving the order to use it?’

‘I have no choice. The
tlatoani
appointed me to lead our armies here. The order has come directly from his palace.’

His new rank of
tlacateccatl
meant that he was now answerable only to Motecuhzoma or Tetzahuitl for his actions. Yet it seemed as if he was asking my approval. I couldn’t possibly give it.

‘The alternative,’ he said, ‘is to allow the Russians to destroy other cities with their bomb. In the end, they might turn the whole of Europe into a wasteland where nothing could live.’

‘When? When are you going to use it?’

‘This very day. Soon I shall be leaving for the front line.’

Despite what he had told me, I suspected the Aztecs had only recently readied their weapon and were making a last-ditch attempt to save the situation.

‘I want to come with you.’

I didn’t know what made me say this. It seemed like madness, a wilful desire to become an accomplice to an enormous crime.

Extepan wiped his mouth with his napkin and rose.

‘You will need to be ready within an hour,’ he said.

A glidecar escorted by four low-flying scouters took us through the ruined city until we came to a turreted grey stone building with a wide entranceway. Snowsuited soldiers were everywhere – crack troops, Extepan informed me, from the Alaska province of Greater Mexico.

The building was a railway station, tracks converging from many directions. Pigeons fluttered under the red-roofed platforms, their droppings streaking ornate iron pillars. Several burnt-out carriages sat in a siding, but the station itself looked undamaged. Soldiers milled about on the main platform, some guarding men in charcoal overalls, whom I guessed were Russian mechanics.

Faintly at first, then more loudly, I heard a regular, rhythmic hissing. Gouts of thick white steam came rolling down the platform and spiralled up towards the roof. They brought with them the smell of soot. Everyone stepped back from the edge of the platform.

It was an old steam train, the engine gleaming black and
bottle-green, a vision from another age. It came grinding to a halt with a metallic screech and a great exhalation.

I waited for the steam to clear. The matching carriages were trimmed with gold, their windows hung with embroidered curtains. The engine had a big black snow-plough at its front and cattle-catchers on its flanks. The driver – a Russian, by the look of him – was guarded by two Aztec soldiers, all of them bundled up against the cold.