Aztec Century (33 page)

After a time I was raised up again. A mountain lion and a man-sized eagle reared their faces at me. I was dragged out through the doorway, past squatting stone soldiers with braziers in their laps. The bright comma of the moon punctuated the dark night sky, and a host of Aztec nobles waited with jewelled costumes and feathered banners.

We were on top of the Great Pyramid in the Temple Precinct: I had been brought out of one of the shrines. The thick night air was filled with smoke and incense, and ranks of whitewashed skulls leered down at me from a blood-red background on Huitzilopochtli’s crowning glory. Extepan sat on a raised throne with Tetzahuitl at his side.

The sky was filled with shooting stars. Fascinated, I traced their paths with my eyes, after-images lingering. Those assembled were murmuring and chanting, a vast communal sound like the pulse and ebb of life itself. I swam in and out of awareness, my mind adrift, unharnessed, accepting of everything. I saw Tetzahuitl raise the imperial diadem and place it on Extepan’s head; I heard him announce that the new
tlatoani
had taken the name of Xiuhcoatl. I saw Extepan rise and receive the humble obeisances of the nobles, who came forward, crouching, heads bowed, not daring to look him in the face. Was that Chicomeztli in the crowd? I could not be sure. Mia stood close to the throne, holding Cuauhtemoc, placid and joyous, fulfilling her desires at last beside the man she loved. I was certain she would become his queen now, and foreign women would be expunged from the heart of the empire. Xiuhcoatl, the Serpent of Fire, weapon of Huitzilopochtli, the instrument which he used to destroy all his enemies.

Now everything slowed, as if all the figures were moving through water. Torchlight spilled across the stone like melted butter. Black-skinned figures with Medusa hair moved on the edges of the darkness, and the pristine sacrificial stone awaited me. I had a vision of Extepan looming over me with a long obsidian knife, naked except for his golden body ornaments. As
the black blade sliced through my breast, he mounted me, penetrated me to the core, and as my heart was torn out, I died in a flurry of release.

When some semblance of consciousness returned, I found myself being led into the Quetzalcoatl temple, through the great gaping mouth.

Still wearing his royal diadem, Extepan stood in front of an obsidian mirror just like the one in Crystal Palace Park. I was brought before it. I searched for my reflection but saw only an opaque blackness that nevertheless had depth. I was certain that if the guards pushed me forward, I would plunge down into a pit of nothingness.

‘You betrayed your vows to me,’ Extepan said, ‘but I intend to honour one of mine to you. Come forward.’

The guards’ hands fell away. Extepan was standing right next to the mirror. I teetered, steadied myself. Took a step towards him. He caught me by the hand.

Figures watched from the shadows around us. My lips were numb, my mouth parched.

‘Once we Mexica believed the world was destroyed and renewed four times,’ Extepan said. ‘Now we know that it has countless existences, all occurring together but apart from one another, like multiple reflections in a mirror.’ His smile was like a leer. ‘Did you know we’ve found another world similar to our own, Catherine? A different Earth, recognizable yet changed in many important respects from our own. We know it’s there because this –’ he gestured at the mirror ‘– is a doorway into it.’

My ears were filled with a buzzing, and I couldn’t tell whether it came from outside or within me.

‘That is what you found in England,’ he said. ‘A doorway. A passage to another place. My father had several built at different locations so that we could send our people through to explore. They return with fascinating stories, Catherine, of people and places so like yet unlike the ones we know.’ He paused. ‘Of course, they travel secretly, a few at a time, disguising themselves. For the moment.’

I wanted to sleep, to flee into darkness and oblivion. But he held me up, drew me close to him. To the mirror.

‘Perhaps you still imagine I intend to have you killed?’ Slowly
he shook his head. ‘Not so, Catherine. Not so. I’m sending you into exile, your sister, too. Somewhere very far away.’

I barely heard him; I felt myself slipping away. Then he put a hand under my chin, raising my head. At first I thought he intended to kiss me, but my jaw opened under the continued pressure of his fingers, and a figure stepped forward to press something into my mouth, something crumbly and sweet which dissolved on my tongue.

The small crowd in the shadows loomed close, and it was as if I saw them through a fish-eye lens, grinning down at me. As I fell forward, plunging into blackness, I was almost certain that one of them, at the very last, was Bevan.

In my dreams, I dreamt of Aztecs, lighting New Fires on mountain tops to celebrate the rebirth of the world, offering human hearts in sacrifice to the sun, aloft in huge solar fleets which flew over vast uncharted landscapes, hungry for conquest.

I dreamt vividly, and at great length.

I remember waking, yet not waking, because my eyes were still closed. I couldn’t move or speak. An Aztec-accented voice was talking in persuasive, hypnotic tones, telling me that Victoria and I had been taken to another Earth, where we were unknown and would lead a simple life of anonymity. All the essentials had been provided for us: a place to live, new identities, a fixed income which would allow us to survive with a modicum of comfort. We were banished utterly, with no hope of returning to our old world. There would be no contact with it, nothing.

The voice was quietly insistent, and I was in a receptive, accepting state of mind. I listened calmly and carefully, absorbing everything. At length the voice fell silent, and I sank back down into sleep again.

When I next awoke, it was to a bright morning. I was lying in a bed in an eggshell green room, flower-patterned curtains drawn back at the window.

I sat up sharply, feeling fragile and brittle but very clearheaded. The room was warm, though a veil of condensation hung on the lower pane of the window. Victoria lay asleep in a bed next to mine.

I rose and went over to her. She was breathing slowly and regularly, her face tranquil.

A cream towelling robe hung on the back of the door. It fitted
perfectly. I turned the tortoiseshell handle of the door, opened it very slowly.

A narrow landing gave access to a bathroom and a second bedroom. Both had a newly decorated look, and they had not been used. Very gingerly, I descended the stone stairway.

Downstairs was a furnished living room with a television and a Welsh dresser stacked with crockery. There was a book-lined study, and a new fitted kitchen with oak-panelled cupboards and a wall-clock that said eight twenty. A pristine water boiler thrummed and swished high on one wall.

The windows looked out across a valley which I immediately knew to be the same one where we had spent our years in hiding. And yet it was not the same: where the Ty Trist colliery had stood were flat-topped landscaped mounds, one of them with a football pitch on top.

Cautiously I opened the door and went outside into a neglected garden whose lawn had, nevertheless, recently been mown. The valley was the same yet different, trees and fields wrongly placed, all the contours of the land subtly or starkly changed. A car passed by on the road which wound up the valley to Tredegar – a petrol-driven car of a design that looked old-fashioned to my eyes. Farms, houses, even the russet stretches of bracken – they were not as I remembered them.

Though the sun was shining, the spring air was chill. I went back inside, opening the kitchen cupboards and finding them stocked with food. I inspected the cartons and tins and jars. Their labels were unfamiliar to me, though they looked just like products that might have existed in my own world. The fridge hummed away in one corner, eggs and several cartons of UHT milk inside. There were two sliced loaves in the freezer, another one in the breadbin. I squeezed it; it was fresh.

The whole place was spotless, and yet it had an unoccupied feel, as if we were newly arrived. I plugged the television into its primitive socket and switched it on. Two presenters, a man and a woman, were talking to a British movie star whom I had never seen or heard of before. Then there was a brief report about a phenomenon called the Greenhouse Effect. A plump, smiling man came on screen with astrological forecasts. Then a relentlessly jovial woman began doing exercises.

On the wall above the fireplace was a print of an oil painting showing a vase of sunflowers.

I heard Victoria scream.

I raced upstairs and found her cowering in the corner of her bed, knees up to her chest, bedclothes drawn around her. She looked terrified. I went to her and she clung tightly to me, whimpering uncontrollably and making inarticulate sounds.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, feeling as if I was living a dream.

I began to stroke her hair while she trembled in my arms. For a long time I did nothing else. I thought then that she was merely suffering a shock reaction to the strangeness of her surroundings and all the terrors which had preceded it. I thought that she would eventually calm down and that we would be able to talk about what happened, to draw comfort and reassurance from one another, to face our bizarre new circumstances together. But I was wrong. Downstairs, the television blared unfamiliar theme music and advertisements for products I felt I should have known, yet didn’t. When at length Victoria seemed calm enough to speak, when I raised her head from my breast, it was damp with the saliva which had been drooling from her mouth. She gazed at me with eyes that had hugely dilated pupils. There was nothing behind them.

Victoria was broken, her mind finally destroyed by what had been done to Alex. I realized this when she emptied her bladder on the bed and had to be led into the bathroom and undressed like a child. After that first shock reaction, she became docile, but, though I tried, I could not get her to utter a single word. She watched my mouth as I spoke, as a young baby might, but never reacted to what I was saying. I didn’t even know if she understood me.

There was soap and fresh towels in the bathroom. The wardrobes were stocked with clean sheets and clothing for both of us, well-tailored but undemonstrative fashions, manufactured in London, Paris and Milan rather than Amecameca or Potomac or Shanghai. The brand names were entirely unfamiliar.

I got Victoria downstairs and sat her in an armchair. The cottage was centrally heated, but I wrapped a blanket around her for extra comfort. I was extremely hungry, and presumed that
she was too, though she gave no sign. But before I set to preparing us a meal, I quickly scouted the spacious surroundings of the cottage, looking for any lurking figures, hoping to find whoever had brought us here hovering nearby, keeping us under surveillance. The cottage stood alone, surrounded by fields, with a terrace of houses and a redbrick school on the hillside above us. There was no one in sight.

I heated some tomato soup, then opened a can of curried vegetables, which we ate with rice. Since arriving here I haven’t eaten meat or served it to Victoria. I remember only too well our final supper, and I think of Alex, and of the pre-Christian Aztec ceremonial rite which reputedly included the eating of the flesh of the sacrificial victim. Human flesh is said to resemble pork in flavour, and rich sauces make many meats indistinguishable from one another. It does not bear dwelling on.

Victoria was ravenous, gulping her soup and ripping slices of bread apart to cram into her mouth. I continued to feel a kind of inner brightness and stillness which I suspected were the aftereffects of whatever drugs had been fed to us in our last meal. The Aztecs were expert in the use of hallucinogenics, and it would have been easy for them to incorporate fungi and other narcotic plants into the dishes we had eaten –
peyotl
, probably, and
ololiuhqui
, and the sacred fungus
teonanacatl
. No doubt there were others, carefully chosen to keep us stupefied yet distracted with visions. I found it impossible to separate what had really happened from what were products of my own drugged imaginings. Everything I could remember seemed slightly unreal.

For the first three days I did nothing except remain in the cottage with Victoria, learning to care for her and attempting to get my bearings. Victoria required little attention except at mealtimes; she soon learned how to use the bathroom, to wash and dress herself, and she sat contentedly in front of the television for hours, watching whatever programmes were showing with a faint, vacant smile. Though she began to respond to me and seemed to understand simple instructions, she never spoke.

The study held a wall of books, some old, some new. There was an atlas and a gazetteer, guides to South Wales and Gwent, a one-volume history of the world, big coffee-table books on literature, the cinema and popular art. And, of course, there
were titles on Mexico and the Aztecs, at least two dozen of them. These, and the sunflower painting, were not-so-subtle forms of Aztec mockery, I was certain. The painting, famous in this world, I later discovered, was unknown in mine.

I scouted the area around the cottage whenever I was able, avoiding contact with the locals. One of the guidebooks told me that the terrace of houses was the village of Troedrhiwgair, again unknown in my world. The people were Welsh, but English-speaking, dressed in a recognizable style of clothing, while the television revealed the manners and mores and means of speaking in this Britain as no different from the one I had left.

It was March here, as on our world, and I was able to calculate that two days had passed between Extepan’s coronation and my waking up in the cottage. Two whole days of nothing except the sound of the Aztec voice in my waking sleep, telling me what I could expect. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the actuality.

It rained for the rest of the week, and I spent much of my time sitting with Victoria, watching news reports and current affairs programmes, perusing book after book, studying their illustrations and photographs minutely, fascinated and dislocated by every fact, small or large, which forced me to accept that we had indeed been cast adrift on a different Earth.

And how different! How mundanely yet stunningly different. Its landscapes and histories echo my own, there are places and names and people which are familiar; yet nothing is quite the same. It is as if our destinies are separate but linked, like ghost reflections of one another, so that some people and places are famous in both – often for different reasons – others not at all. Of course, I was startled to discover that here the Aztecs are but a memory, their nascent empire destroyed by the very man who set them on the path to future greatness in my world. There is a British royal family that stems from a line of the ruling house extinguished on my Earth. Here, my great-grandfather was never born and our house at Marlborough does not exist I feel like a ghost. What could be more cruel than to inhabit a world which knows nothing of you? Extepan chose his revenge well.

There were days, especially early on, when I believed my knowledge that I was but a fiction would drive me into the same
kind of madness as Victoria. Imagine, just try to imagine, living in a world that seems an invention, a parody of reality. It’s little wonder that I have become intensely mistrustful to the point of paranoia and seldom like leaving the cottage. Even less do I like having to meet people, however ordinary-looking or prosaic their concerns. A chance encounter fills me with dread; a simple ‘Good morning’ is enough to make me want to flee for fear that I might be forced into a conversation that will swiftly reveal the depths of my ignorance of this world, exposing me as a fake, an intruder, an anomaly. What could be worse than living in a place where every mundanity is an attack on memory and belief, a threat to one’s already fragile sense of self?

Yet if I thought that oblivion in this world was punishment enough, I did not realize that Extepan had reserved the subtlest cruelty for last. At the end of the first week, a maroon van came jolting down the rutted driveway to the cottage. Stomach churning with anxiety, I rushed outside as it pulled up. A man got out and smiled at me.

I went immobile with shock.

I watched him walk around to the back of the van, open the door and remove a large cardboard box filled with groceries.

It was Bevan.

He wasn’t the Bevan of my world, I knew that immediately, because he was slimmer, balder, and wore a greying beard. He carried himself differently, was less slovenly dressed, wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt, the kind of clothing which my Bevan had never favoured. But their faces were the same – the prominent jaw and ears, the small mouth – and they were the same age. They could have been twins.

He brought the box up to me, still smiling.

‘Not a bad morning, is it? They said you wanted this.’

The smile was more open, less devious, than the one I knew. He wasn’t the same man, yet it was him, it was him.

‘You’re down for weekly deliveries, that’s right, isn’t it?’

I made to speak, but first had to clear my throat.

‘Who arranged this?’

He looked a little put-out. ‘Got a call from a bloke in London, didn’t I? He said you and your sister had just moved in and wanted a regular delivery. Run the local store I do, see.’

Again I found it hard to speak, and even harder to think clearly.

‘Did they say who they were?’

Now he was distinctly unsure of me. ‘Someone from your bank, it was. They’ve opened an account for you with me, so it’s all paid for. All right, is it?’

I looked at the box. It held bread, milk, tinned goods and washing powder. It was hard not to stare at him.

‘There’s another one in the back of the van,’ he said. ‘Where’d you want me to put it?’

I was still numb. ‘In the kitchen,’ I said, moving aside, indicating. ‘It’s in there.’

I followed him inside. He put the box down, then went out again, but not before saying, ‘Bit of rain we’ve been having.’

I couldn’t answer. He returned promptly with a second box, holding fresh vegetables and fruit.

Victoria was still asleep upstairs, and I was grateful, in case the sight of him sent her into another screaming frenzy. Everything about his manner suggested he was entirely innocent of who we really were and where we had come from, but his very appearance had thrown me into the throes of suspicion and unease. I wanted him to be gone, but at the same time I needed to find out what he knew.

‘You said it was paid for,’ I remarked.

He nodded blithely. ‘There’s an account at the local branch. They said you din’t want any fuss. Sister’s not well, is she?’

My suspicions redoubled. ‘Who told you that?’

He was peering around the kitchen. ‘Man who phoned. Mentioned that she’d had a breakdown, poor dab, and that you’d come here so she could convalesce. Nice and peaceful spot, isn’t it?’