Aztec Century (23 page)

‘We found it in a shed,’ Extepan remarked to me. ‘It’s been quite excellently maintained.’

‘We’re travelling to the front in it?’

‘Of course. Let’s get aboard.’

Pachtli accompanied us into the front carriage. Various Aztec generals and other high-ranking officers were also boarding. I thought they looked disgruntled, as if they deemed it absurd to travel in such an antique when a fast-flying transporter would take them to the front in a fraction of the time. But Extepan’s insistence on using the train was typical of the whimsical side of his character.

The carriages were carpeted, with upholstered seats, and tables draped with white cloths. It was easier to imagine we were going on a sightseeing tour rather than to use a weapon of unimaginable destructive power.

Soon afterwards the train jolted and began moving out of the station. It quickly gathered speed, steam billowing past my window, wheels settling into a steady
trocketa-trocketa
rhythm on the rails. Extepan began explaining some of the difficulties involved in keeping a steam engine operational in such bitter weather: he had obviously been talking to the driver or his mechanics. Meanwhile Velikiye-Luki slid by the carriage windows. By day, the snow which had covered the city since the battle had softened its shattered appearance, ruined towers and gutted apartment blocks rising like amorphous sculptures and lattices out of a frozen white sea.

A waiter appeared and asked if we wanted drinks. He was a European, though his accented Nahuatl was fluent. A Pole, perhaps, or a German. Extepan and I requested orange juice, Pachtli a glass of red wine.

Presently Extepan departed to check on the comfort of his
generals. I had avoided speaking to Pachtli since rising, and I felt uneasy in his company. Now we faced one another across the table, alone. His reflection in the window was smiling at me.

‘This is a good way to travel, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have never been on such a train before. Did you sleep well last night?’

I looked at him. There was nothing in his face to indicate that the question was anything other than a pleasantry.

The waiter arrived with our drinks. He had no sooner set them down on the table than Extepan returned, much to my relief.

‘You will require lunch soon?’ the waiter asked.

‘Whenever it’s ready,’ Extepan told him.

I suddenly realized how hungry I was. I had eaten nothing since dinner the night before.

The train was now passing through open countryside, a flat white landscape broken by lines of bare trees and dark stands of pine. A road ran in parallel to the railway, posts holding electric cables marching beside it. The sky had clouded over to a uniform grey, and a pale haze dimmed the horizon.

‘Are you going to use the weapon on Moscow?’ I asked in English.

Extepan looked surprised. He shook his head. ‘We wouldn’t destroy any capital unless it was unavoidable. No, a smaller demonstration may suffice. Yesterday a message was sent to the commander of the Russian forces in the city of Rzhev, which lies in the direct route of our advance on Moscow. The message advised him to evacuate the city and all his troops before dawn today. We have clearly indicated that we intend to unleash a major new weapon there and that thousands of lives will be lost unless it’s evacuated. Let’s hope he sees fit to heed the warning.’

‘What if the Russians decide to strike first with another of their bombs?’

‘Information received from our
quimichtin
suggests that they won’t have further bombs ready for launch for some days. By then we will have destroyed a dozen Russian cities, if necessary.’

The literal meaning of
quimichtin
was ‘mice’, but it had long been applied to undercover agents and spies.

I glanced down at the pistol in Extepan’s belt. It would be a simple matter to snatch it out and shoot him through the heart.

But it would make no difference, I knew that. Someone worse like Maxixca would take command of the empire’s armies, and the weapon would be used as planned. What sort of weapon could be as deadly as the bomb – that enormous thunderhead of fire and smoke with its cataclysmic power? It still defeated my imagination. But I knew Extepan better than to imagine he would make empty threats.

The train sped on through a town of wooden houses and drab prefabricated huts. It looked undamaged by the war, but it was deserted, no smoke rising from the chimneys, many doors open to the snow and wind.

We were served pancakes with smoked salmon, followed by thick slices of gâteau. The meal seemed an obscene luxury, but I ate every morsel of it. Pachtli drank his way through a whole bottle of wine. I caught Extepan glancing at him with unmistakable disapproval. He asked Pachtli to leave us, and the adjutant lurched off down the corridor.

‘I didn’t choose him,’ Extepan remarked to me in English.

‘Pachtli?’

‘His father once saved my brother Ixtlilpopoca from falling into a ravine when he was a small boy. Motecuhzoma was thus bound by a debt of honour to his family. Pachtli is the least worthy of his sons – a
mamiqui
. But he has the protection and patronage of the
tlatoani
.’

Mamiqui
meant ‘idler’. I watched Extepan’s reflection in the window, preferring not to look directly at him. ‘He told me you both went to the same
calmecac
in Tenochtitlan.’

‘That’s true.’

‘You were trained to be a priest?’

He gave me an incredulous look. ‘No more than you would be trained to be a nun if you went to a convent school.’

‘So you didn’t have any formal religious training?’

‘I thought you had once been a student of our culture.’ He waited until I looked directly at him. ‘I think, Catherine, that too often people persist in thinking of we Mexica and our world as it was centuries ago.’

‘So what happens at the
calmecac?’
I persisted.

‘You know quite well what happens. We are educated there, in all areas of knowledge, not just the religion of our Revered Mother. It’s hundreds of years since the
calmecac
were schools for the instruction of priests. They educate the sons and daughters of the ruling ranks, as the
telpochcalli
serve the children of all other citizens.’

The train rushed on, over culverts and bridges, through woodland and bare white plain. It was hard to believe that a ferocious war had been raging over these very lands. It was hard to believe that human beings lived here at all.

‘There’s still a stone in your mouth,’ Extepan said. ‘Spit it out.’

His shadowy reflection in the window highlighted the angular, un-Mexica aspect of his features. He was less reserved, more approachable than most Aztecs I knew. And yet … Was there an unbridgeable gulf between us? The only way to find out was to speak the truth.

‘Did Pachtli tell you I went out last night?’ I said.

‘He mentioned it. That was foolish of you, Catherine.’

‘Did he say any more?’

‘Only that he had gone searching for you and found you in the square.’

‘Nothing more?’

‘What is it you wish to say?’

He was impatient, perhaps angry with me, but still restraining himself. He always spoke calmly, was always ready to listen. This had once been reassuring; now it was unnerving.

‘I went into the church across the square,’ I said.

As plainly and as bluntly as possible, I told him about the steaming corpse and the unmistakable evidence of a ritual sacrifice according to the old Aztec customs. Extepan listened intently, his face giving nothing away. The only thing I held back from him was my suspicion that the six soldiers who had carried out the sacrifice were Pachtli and the household guard.

‘Pachtli thought you were trying to escape but were deterred by the snow,’ Extepan said.

‘Escape? To where? And why should I want to escape?’

‘Why indeed?’

‘Are you saying you don’t believe me?’

Not at all. I’m rather relieved to learn that it was curiosity rather than a desire to join our enemies that made you leave the house.’

For a moment I was dumbfounded. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? Your soldiers are performing human sacrifices. Am I to take it that this is something you condone?’

It was Extepan’s turn to gaze out of the window. The train hurried on,
trocketa-trocketa
, passing through the deserted station of yet another ghost-town. I felt as if I had done something irrevocable, as if I had forced him into the position of having to admit that, yes, it was true what the enemies of the Aztecs had always claimed: the old gods were still secretly worshipped under the veneer of Christianity, and that the bloodthirsty rituals designed to appease them were still practised.

‘As a boy,’ Extepan remarked, ‘I was always asking my father to tell me stories about his military exploits. I remember the first one he told. As a young man he served in India. In 1930 our forces suffered a defeat at Karachi, and he led the counter-attack. When the city was taken, the bodies of over three thousand Mexica officers were found. They had been buried up to their necks, then had their heads smashed to pulp with cudgels. The commanding officer in the city was British.’

The waiter appeared with a jug of black coffee. Extepan waited until he was gone.

‘During the invasion of Japan,’ he went on, ‘captured Mexica were staked to the ground and had boiling oil poured over them. In Cape Colony their limbs and genitals were cut off and they were left to be eaten by scavengers. During the fighting in the Midlands of England, Mexica prisoners were executed by slow disembowelment. This took the form of slashing a crucifix in their abdomens, then tearing back the skin—’

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Under the extremes of war, every atrocity is possible, and any race may be the perpetrators. Many killings are supposedly done in the name of religion, but usually that’s simply a rationalization for barbarity. Do you think the British soldiers who disembowelled their prisoners with the sign of the cross were true Christians?’

I was silent.

‘I’m not condoning what those soldiers did in the church, and I’ll see to it that an investigation is carried out to try to discover who was responsible. But I’m not surprised that it happened. The war has been bitter here, and atrocities have been committed by both sides.’

‘They tore his heart out and burnt it in a helmet. It was a sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli.’

Extepan sighed, his patience threadbare. ‘I’m very well aware that most of our enemies believe that we still practise human sacrifice, cannibalism and doubtless other barbaric rites that I have no inkling of. It’s the nature of war to see one’s enemies as devils, and rational argument is powerless against such superstitions. We aren’t devils, Catherine. We’re human beings like any other.’

‘Yours is the only nation that’s made a religion of war. It’s obvious to everyone that the Aztecs are intent on swallowing up the whole world.’

For once he did not take me to task for using the blanket term ‘Aztec’ rather than ‘Mexica’. Instead he simply said, ‘We are no more belligerent than you British were when your empire was expanding. We fight to protect our interests, as you did. There’s not so much to choose between us, except that we are the victors and you’re the losers. I can’t say I care for your hypocrisy.’

I decided to match his anger with my own insistence.

‘I want to know,’ I said. ‘Are such sacrifices commonplace?’

‘No,’ he snapped. ‘They’re not.’

‘Will you give me your word of honour?’

For a moment I thought he might erupt with rage. He rose.

‘If it’s necessary, then I give it. You will excuse me. There is much to be done before we reach the front line.’

He went off to join his generals.

Pachtli returned soon afterwards, and I steeled myself for the worst. But he looked sullen, and I wondered if Extepan had said anything to him about the sacrifice. He slumped in the seat opposite me, and, to my relief, folded his arms across his chest and went to sleep.

Onwards, deeper and deeper into Russia. I had never seen such flatness, such wildness and desolation. Despite the ample evidence of human habitation – the fields, grain silos like fat
rockets, huddled villages and towns, distant apartment blocks of community-farm workers – despite all this, the landscape seemed raw and empty, the works of humans dwarfed by the scale of the natural world, the immense snow-laden sky, the wind gusting down from the polar regions, the massed ranks of black pines like Nature’s armies awaiting mobilization.

At length I began to notice moving dots in the sky – aircraft – and then fields whose snow had been churned by caterpillar treads or blown into telltale arcs by hovership skirts. I saw a bare plain littered with the black hulks of Russian tanks, too many to count. There were hundreds of smaller dark mounds in the snow. The train veered away, rushing through another town. Here, many of the buildings had been destroyed. There was a lurch, and the sound of the wheels on the rails changed subtly. The train turned down a siding which looked newly constructed. In the near distance was a dense stand of bare trees and numerous vehicles and men.

Extepan returned. He had donned his snowsuit. Shaking Pachtli awake, he ordered him to fetch my luggage.

‘We’ll soon be there,’ he said to me. ‘Please get dressed.’

He was stiff, formal, not deigning to look at me. I reached for my jacket.

‘I’m glad I decided to bring you with me,’ he said. ‘It’s one thing to talk about war, quite another to see it for yourself.’

An hour later I stood surrounded by a cluster of snowsuited Aztec generals on a low rise at the edge of the stand of trees.

We were looking east, and I could just make out the road and railway line crossing one another in the distance. Rzhev, apparently less than ten miles away, was just over the horizon. No one was able – or willing – to tell me whether or not the Russians had evacuated it.

Dusk was beginning to gather, and the clouds had started to empty their burden of snow. The fat flakes gusted down, coating the heads and shoulders of the military élite. They stamped their feet in the snow, slapped their mittened hands together, but mostly they were still and silent, awaiting the activation of the weapon without impatience.