War God (6 page)

Tozi started to sing. ‘
Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hm … Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hmm.
’
The sound was so low as to be almost inaudible. But it didn’t matter how quiet or how loud you sang it. What mattered was the sequence of the notes, the tempo of their repetition and the intent of the singer.

Tozi’s intent was to save herself, and poor Coyotl and this strange, mysterious woman. She cared nothing for Xoco. ‘
Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hm
,’
she sang. ‘
Hmm-a-hmm-hmm … hmm-hmm
.’
She kept winding up the tempo, as her mother had taught her, and felt the fog flowing out of her, invisible like breath, unsettling the senses and lightening the heads of everyone it touched. People stumbled, collapsed, barged into one another, became aggressive and reckless, and the priests of Hummingbird spun round seeking the source of the commotion. Then the mental fog slammed into Xoco who started up from the floor where she was crouching and charged straight at Ahuizotl. He was too surprised to avoid her and when she hit him with all her weight he went down hard, smashing his head into the ground.

Chaos erupted as priests fought to subdue and shackle Xoco. She seemed supernaturally strong and howled like a demon. There were not enough enforcers to stop the many other fights spreading like wildfire through the crowd.

‘Now we get out of here,’ said Tozi. She swept up Coyotl, still in a deep sleep, and signalled to the woman to follow her.

The hill was steep, filled with hollows and overgrown with tall, feathery grass. That was why Shikotenka had been drawn to it. He’d found a deep crevice about halfway up the slope and snaked his lean, hard-muscled body into it just as dawn was breaking, hiding himself completely from view to observe the Mexica as they converged in the vast natural amphitheatre below. There were four regiments,
each at their full strength of eight thousand men, and he counted them in as they approached one by one through passes in the surrounding hills, a huge and fearsome war machine the size of a city, mustering here as the day wore on to bring murder and mayhem to Tlascala.

Dressed only in a loincloth and sandals, his thick black hair drawn back from his brow in long, matted braids, Shikotenka’s chest, abdomen, legs and arms, now pressed tightly into the soil and rock of his homeland, were criss-crossed with the scars of battle wounds received in hand-to-hand combat against the Mexica. At thirty-three years of age he had already been a warrior for seventeen years. The experience showed in the flat, impassive planes of his face and the determined set of his wide, sensual mouth, which masked equally the cold cruelty and calculation of which he was capable as well as the bravery, resolve and inspired flights of rash brilliance that had led to his election, just a month before, as the battle king of Tlascala. A man of direct action, he had not thought of delegating a subordinate for today’s assignment. The very survival of his people depended on what happened in the next day and night and he would trust this task to no one else.

Eyes narrowed, he watched as teams from the first of the enemy regiments used ropes and pegs to mark out the perimeter of a great circle on the open plain. The circle was then divided into four segments. Thereafter as each regiment arrived it was directed to its own segment of the circle, and the men at once set about pitching tents that varied in size from compact two-man units to enormous marquees and pavilions, where the standards of leading officers were raised. Meanwhile scouts were sent out in small, fast-moving squads to comb the nearby hills for spies and ambushes. Five times already, men beating the bush had passed uncomfortably close to where Shikotenka lay hidden.

Was it possible, he wondered, to hate an entire people as intensely as he hated the Mexica, and yet still admire them?

Their organisation, for example. Their toughness. Their efficiency. Their obsidian-hard will. Their absolute, ruthless, uncompromising commitment to power. Their limitless capacity for violence.

Weren’t these all admirable qualities in their own right?

Moreover, here in force, in their tens of thousands, he had to admit they made a stunning impact on the senses.

His vantage point was five clear bowshots from the edge of their camp, yet his nostrils were filled with the reek of copal incense and putrid human blood, the characteristic stink of the Mexica that clung about them like a half-articulated threat wherever they gathered in large numbers.

Also rising off them was a tremendous cacophony of sound – drums, flutes and songs, the buzz of fifty thousand conversations, vendors shouting their wares in four makeshift markets that had sprung up across the plain like strange exotic growths.

With thousands of porters, water-carriers and personal slaves, and a ragged host of camp followers including butchers and tailors, astrologers and doctors, cooks and odd-job men, vendors of all manner of foodstuffs and services, and a parallel army of gaudily dressed pleasure girls, Shikotenka calculated the total numbers in the Mexica camp as somewhere close to sixty thousand. Despite the rigid military lines where the regiments
were setting out their tents, the overall impression on the eye was therefore as much that of a country carnival as of a great army pausing on its march. Nor did the masses of soldiers detract from this impression of gaiety, for the Mexica rewarded success in battle with uniforms of feathers and gold and richly dyed fabrics that sparkled and glimmered in the sun, merging into waves and spirals of startling greens, yellows, blues, reds and deep purples, interspersed with expanses of dazzling white.

More than any other factor, what determined a man’s worth amongst the Mexica was the number of captives of high quality taken alive in the heat of battle and sacrificed to their ferocious war god Huitzilopochtli, an entity of surpassing depravity and ugliness, whose name, somewhat incongruously, meant ‘Hummingbird’.

All those of whatever age who had not yet taken a captive were considered novices. They signified their lack of achievement by wearing nothing more than a white loincloth and a plain white sleeveless jacket of padded cotton armour. There were a great many novices in this army, Shikotenka noted with interest, far more than normal in a force of such size.

More experienced fighters also used the armour but it was concealed beneath uniforms appropriate to their status.

Those who had taken two prisoners wore a tall conical headdress and a matching bodysuit. The shimmering colours of both cap and suit – most often crimson or yellow, but sometimes sky blue or deep green – came from thousands of tiny feathers painstakingly stitched to the underlying cotton garments. Men entitled to wear this uniform were usually the largest block in any Mexica army, but in three of the four regiments here today they were outnumbered by novices.

Next came warriors who had taken three captives. Shikotenka spotted companies of them distributed across the whole mass of the army, recognisable by their long armour and butterfly-shaped back ornaments made of purple and green feathers stitched to a wicker frame.

Still higher up the chain of honour, and again distributed everywhere across the army, were those who had been admitted to the military orders of the Jaguar and the Eagle. These might be the sons of nobles, in some cases unblooded but trained for war in one of the great military academies, or commoners who had taken four prisoners in battle. The jaguar knights wore the skins of jaguars and ferocious, garishly painted wooden helmets in the form of snarling jaguar heads. The eagle knights wore cotton bodysuits embroidered with the feathers of golden eagles, and wooden helmets in the form of eagle’s heads.

A mass of warriors, their hair cut to a distinctive crest dividing the scalp, marked concentrations of men with more than six captives to their credit, who fought in pairs and had taken a vow never to retreat once battle had begun.

Even more formidable were the Cuahchics, their scalps shaved except for a lock of hair braided with a red ribbon above the left ear. Each Cuahchic’s head was painted half blue and half red, or in some cases half blue and half yellow. They, too, had taken at least six captives, but they had also performed twenty acts of conspicuous bravery in battle.

Shikotenka grimaced, recalling previous occasions when he’d faced the Cuahchics. He would prefer not to face them again tonight if he could possibly avoid it.

But whatever would be would be. He dismissed the painted warriors from his mind and turned his gaze towards the centre of the camp. Teams of porters and labourers had been working there since morning to fit together the huge billowing pavilion of the Snake Woman, commander-in-chief of this colossal field army – who was, of course, a man.

Indeed, as far back as anyone could remember, it was an unexplained mystery that the revered Snake Woman of the Mexica, their highest-ranking official after the Great Speaker, always was and always had been a man.

The present incumbent, Coaxoch, now in his early fifties and enormously fat, had once been a renowned warrior. Moctezuma had appointed him soon after he became Speaker sixteen years ago and Coaxoch had remained his closest adviser and confidant ever since. A blow against Coaxoch was therefore a blow against Moctezuma himself and thus against the pride of the Mexica nation. It would evoke an immediate and, Shikotenka hoped, rash response. That was why he was here, on this grassy hill, crammed into this rocky crevice, watching and counting. If the gods were with him and blessed his plan, the result would be spectacular harm to the enemy.

A surge of movement in the southwestern quadrant of the camp caught his attention. He squinted. Shaded by splendid umbrellas of quetzal feathers, a procession of nobles and knights was advancing towards the centre. Shikotenka narrowed his eyes again and this time clearly made out the corpulent form of Coaxoch amongst the feathers, sprawled on a litter carried on the shoulders of half a dozen brawny slaves.

Conspicuous in the procession were four high-ranking nobles attired with spectacular radiance in elaborate rainbow-plumed headdresses and mosaic face masks of costly jade. On their backs, jutting an arm’s-length above their heads, they wore the green triple-pennant standards of regiment generals. Shikotenka bit back the roar of loathing that rose automatically to his lips as he recognised Coaxoch’s sons, promoted far above their station on account of their father’s influence with Moctezuma, and already infamous for their foolishness and cruelty. The year before he’d met and instantly detested Mahuizoh, the eldest of them, when he’d led the Mexica delegation at so-called ‘peace talks’ with his people. How could he forget the man’s bombastic, bullying manner and his loud-mouthed threats of rapine and ruin if his exorbitant demands for tribute were not met? Shikotenka uttered a silent prayer to the gods to put Mahuizoh under his knife tonight.

More movement in the northeast marked the location of a second procession, also advancing on the centre. It was made up of several hundred warrior priests dressed in tall headdresses and bodysuits embroidered with a background of black feathers to represent the night sky and patterns of white feathers to represent the stars. With them, bound together at the neck by heavy wooden halters, they dragged a hundred captives daubed with chalk paint and dressed in ungainly clothes of white paper.

The two processions converged in front of Coaxoch’s pavilion. There, with much burning of copal, blaring of conches and beating of gongs and drums, the priests set up their altar and a carved wooden idol of Hummingbird. Propping himself on one elbow, conversing with his sons who had gathered close around him, Coaxoch looked on from his litter.

Shikotenka didn’t doubt that every one of the prisoners who were about to be sacrificed were Tlascalans like himself. For, unlike the host of other free kingdoms that had once flourished in the region, Tlascala had always rejected the offers of vassal status and the payment of extortionate annual tributes to the Mexica in return for peace; as a result, it was the target of continuous raids by Moctezuma’s armies. These attacks were intended to punish Tlascalan defiance and provide an object lesson to neighbouring peoples of the costs of independence. But their larger purpose was to ensure a steady supply of prisoners for sacrifice to the bloodthirsty pantheon at the apex of which sat Hummingbird, the divine source of all Mexica violence, who was reputed to have said in the long ago: ‘My mission and my task is war. I will watch and join issue with all manner of nations, and that without mercy.’

In the past three months some terrible sense of urgency, some looming supernatural threat that called for a great mass offering to Hummingbird, had aroused the Mexica to new heights of cruelty. Shikotenka’s spies thought the whole matter might be connected to the appearance of a small band of mysterious white-skinned beings, possibly deities, who had arrived in the lands of the Maya some months before, in immense boats that moved by themselves without paddles, fought and won a great battle using devastating, unknown weapons and then returned to the ocean whence they had come. Much about this strange encounter suggested the legends of the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, and his oft-prophesied return, something that Moctezuma as a devotee of Hummingbird would certainly have cause to fear and attempt to delay or even prevent by offering extravagant sacrifices to the war god. This was only a theory at this stage, but it seemed plausible to Shikotenka in the light of Moctezuma’s famously superstitious nature, and it would certainly explain why Coaxoch’s thirty-two thousand warriors had been diverted from other duties and put in the field with the exclusive task of gathering in huge numbers of new victims. They had already ravaged a dozen Tlascalan cities, seized thousands of young men and women and dragged them off to the prison pens a hundred miles away in Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital, to be fattened for the coming holocaust. Typical of the Mexica, however, a few of the captives – like these poor wretches now being dragged to the altar – had remained with the armies to be sacrificed at important staging posts on the march route.