77
Sitting on an upper bough next to the trunk, Cooper Jones grabbed an overhead branch with her right hand and attempted to stanch the bleeding below the armpit with her other arm. However, the pain from protruding bone made that almost impossible, and when Coop removed pressure from the open wound, it dripped blood into the thick mesh of branches below.
She also had to worry about the Apachureros at the big pine’s base. She could hear them over the din of the cataract and the falls. One man argued that they should send someone up the tree to look for her. The climb was difficult, and it seemed unlikely she’d be up there. Moreover, none of them wanted to clamber up over the abyss and swing out onto the wet slippery tree limb, and others argued that chasing her would be a waste of time.
The lowest limb, which did not overhang the stream, was nearly twenty feet off the ground. They knew that Coop never could have reached it and did not believe she would have attempted the limb overhanging the cataract.
Abandoning the tree, the bandits followed the stream running along the cliff face. Their flashlights illuminating the dark driving rain, they searched the cliff face for signs of Coop.
When a droplet of blood leaked through the dense mesh of needles and limbs and splattered a rock below, a straggling dog caught the scent and howled.
Coop was stunned by how many rounds they fired into the treetop. It shook the tree like a hurricane of lead.
Don’t they understand they could destroy the codex?
Apparently they didn’t know or care.
That she was unhurt she considered a miracle.
After softening her up, however, they did attempt to negotiate: “Hey, chiquita, we ain’t gonna hurt you. Come on down with the stuff, no?”
Yeah, right, she thought glumly.
Knowing now they had her treed, they determined to send someone up to flush her out. Removing their belts, they looped them together into a crude rope and formed a human ladder. The bandit at the pyramid’s summit then looped the belt-rope over the limb and began pulling himself up the trunk.
Through the sheet lightning’s blaze, she saw the man work his way up the tree.
Aw shit, he’s coming up.
She reviewed her weaponry. By the grace of the gods, she still had a Beretta strapped inside the combat fatigues to her thigh and a KA-BAR combat knife sheathed to her calf.
Not much against a dozen Apachureros.
They were raising their weapons again—apparently hoping to soften her up for her tree-climbing visitor—when in the sheet lightning’s blaze she saw the croc explode out of the stream. The shooters’ eyes were focused on the treetop, and the croc, snake-fast, blindsided them. Knocking bandits off their feet with its massive tail, it dispatched them with its gigantic jaws, quick as the flashing lightning. Thunderbolts boomed and blazed again, and through the branches, she glimpsed the croc snapping off heads, legs, and arms with almost incomprehensible fury.
Nor was the croc alone. The big white jaguar—brilliantly lit up by the storm’s pyrotechnics—detonated out from behind a clump of boulders and took out a shooter who was sighting in on the killer croc. Hitting him laterally, it knocked him off his feet and crushed his skull with its massive jaws.
Chain lightning streaked across the sky. In its dazzling light, Coop saw the eagle swoop. Raking men with its beak, claws and flogging them with its wings, it screamed at them as if all the banshees in hell were inside it, fighting to get out.
The bandits—in blind panic—fired chaotically into the dark. The lightning forked, and she saw three of them drop, shot by their own comrades.
Then all was still, and when the lightning flared again, she saw they were all dead.
Her animal friends had killed them all.
All save the sole survivor assiduously working his way up the tree, a knife and a semiautomatic pistol strapped to his hip. “Hey, gringa,” he said, “I know you up there, and them animals can’t get me, not way up here. They no follow me up no tree.”
He had some stones, Coop had to give him that. He wasn’t bothered at all that those animals had just killed all his friends. He was going to be trouble.
“I hear you got some stuff with you, no? Well, fewer amigos for me—I mean for you and me—to share? It all ours now, thanks to them loco animals. Man, I never seen nothing like that. We wait in the tree for them to leave, and I split everything with you. Then I look after you, protect you, be your amigo. See, I ain’t a bad guy.”
All the while he talked, he continued to climb the tree, hand over hand, limb over limb.
Then she could see him.
God, he was ugly—black teeth, black eyes, black hair, a black heart.
“Come on, gringa, we friends, no? I no hurt you. Give me the relic, and I go. You then go wherever you want. You just no go with the stuff.”
“What about our split?” Coop asked, smiling.
“I get my stuff, you get your life. That’s a fair split, no?”
“Can I trust you?”
“Do I look like a man who would lie to you?”
Coop did not dignify his question with an answer. Instead she slipped the .32-caliber Beretta out of her shoulder holster. It was a purse gun with limited stopping power, making her only hope a head shot. But she could barely see him through the intersecting branches. Even worse, she did not know if her pistol would fire. The rapids had slammed Coop, her gun, and her KA-BAR against rocks and logs, then hurled them over three consecutive waterfalls. That she had any weapons at all was a miracle.
Still, the pistol was her best chance.
Her only chance.
She had to let him get up close.
He stopped a dozen feet beneath her limb. Obscured by branches and cones, he braced his gun arm on a limb and leveled his pistol at her. “I know you ain’t got no weapons—not after going over them falls.”
Coop could see his gun clearly now—a no-shit .45 semiautomatic. He was studying her over its sights, the interposing branches and the gun offering him a surprising amount of cover. Still, she had to go for the shot. She turned around and surreptitiously slipped the pistol and knife into her waistband.
“I’m coming down,” she said.
“Toss me the bag on your back.”
“It’s fragile. I’ll come down and give it to you.”
“I have you covered, bebé, every inch of the way.”
She had to turn her back to him to descend. She didn’t like turning her back, but she figured he’d think twice about shooting into the knapsack. He also would not want to shoot her and then watch her tumble into the cataract.
She climbed down the branches, and when she turned around, he was face-to-grinning-face with her, pulling the .45 out of his cross-draw nylon holster.
With her eardrums blown out by the rapids and falls, she hadn’t heard him sneak up the tree.
“Keep hell hot for me,” he said, his grin now ugly.
Still, Coop had her .32 Beretta out and shoved it into his belly.
Only to hear a sickening click! as the hammer dry-snapped on a dead, waterlogged cartridge.
He had the cocked .45 under her chin before she could reach for her KA-BAR.
“Say buenas noches, chiquita,” he said.
There was no time for an adios, however. The big anaconda—exploding out of the pitch-black night—clamped its fanged jaws onto the bandit’s gun arm. His gunshot hit the trunk, but by then Coop had hurled her KA-BAR between his eyes at point-blank range.
The throw’s forward momentum, however, pulled her off her perch. Falling into the bandit full-force, Coop was shocked to feel his arms embrace her in a death grip, even as her blade—buried to the hilt between his eyes—pushed against her cheek.
Then she, the bandit, and the anaconda were plummeting through the branches, the man and the snake breaking them off in front of her. She tried desperately to throw him off, but his arms’ rictus-grip constrained her like hoops of steel even as the man and the snake snapped off the bra
nches before her, which she tried to grab but failed to reach.
Limb after limb after limb, they shattered, and then they were free of the boughs, needles, and cones.
They were falling through space.
Even so, the lightning storm continued unceasingly, illuminating the white-water hell sixty feet below.
Trapped in his death lock, Coop, the dead man, and the massive snake hit the rapids like a megaton of bricks.
Yet again, the bandit and the snake cushioned Coop’s fall.
Well, she thought grimly, at least this time you didn’t get knocked out.
Then she heard the thunder of the falls, and she wished she were unconscious.
Locked in the man’s unbreakable death grip, the big snake still affixed to his upper right arm, the three of them rocketed toward the 120-foot falls, its din now ear detonating.
Four waterfalls in one day.
God, no.
The rapids swept Coop and her two friends over the brink and into the mist rising up from the thundering water below.
They vanished into the mist and the frigid foam, then crashed into the water beneath it.
Again with the bandit and the snake under her.
Again, they cushioned her landing, and this time the concussion broke Coop free of the man’s deadly embrace.
The cataract continued downstream and took her with it.
She wished for a moment that the codex urn were still strapped to her chest, so she could cling to it.
But then her thoughts went onto other things.
She was now . . . sinking.
Swim! she thought frantically.
But her arms and legs would not move.
Brutal, battering, freezing water and terminal exhaustion paralyzed her.
Coop was going into shock.
And going under.
Please, God, Coop prayed to the god she’d never believed existed, don’t let me lose the Quetzalcoatl prophecy. Kill me if you must, but, please, let the codex live.
Then she knew no more.
PART XIII
TENOCHTITLÁN
THE CITY OF THE MIGHTY MONTEZUMA
We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and temples and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream.
—BERNAL DIAZ DEL CASTILLO, A CAPTAIN OF CORTÉS, UPON SEEING TENOCHTITLÁN FOR THE FIRST TIME, A.D. 1519
78
I got my first glimpse of the Aztec capital coming down a mountain and into the valley the Aztecs called Anahuac, the Land Between the Waters, and which the rest of the One-World called the Valley of Mexico.
Tenochtitlán glittered under the noonday sun like a polished gem in a valley lake the size of a vast sea. The whole city seemed to erupt from the waters—temples high enough to reach the gods and lofty buildings, all brightly colored—greens and yellows, reds and blues. From a distance, it looked as if a rainbow had fallen from the sky and settled upon the city.
The valley itself was a dark, dramatic framework for the brilliant city. Ringed by mountains, many of which boasted the smoking summits from which the gods occasionally blew fire, while others were snowcapped. The tallest and most stunning of them, I learned from the guard officer assigned to walk beside my litter, were Smoky Mountain and his lady, White Woman. Both were abodes of the gods.
The first time I saw Mayapán, I thought no city could be bigger or more magnificent, but now I realized that Mayapán was a fly and Tenochtitlán an eagle—a rich, powerful, and arrogant bird of prey that carried back to its nest the treasures of its neighbors.
Sitting on the lake, it was two miles from land, with four paved roads, each ten paces wide, extended out to it. The causeways were packed with people entering and leaving the city.
The roads over water were interrupted by bridges that allowed canoes and other traffic to pass freely.
“The bridges can be pulled away to defend the city,” the guard officer told me, confirming what Sparrow had said earlier, “though no king would be foolish enough to attack us.”
Canals threaded through the city like a spiderweb so that all sections of the city could be visited either on foot or by canoe.
Countless canoes, like swarms of water bugs, came and went, delivering food and raw trade goods to the city and returning filled with manufactured goods to their towns and villages.
Sparrow had told me that Tenochtitlán was perhaps ten times bigger than Mayapán. With nearly two hundred thousand people, it was the largest city in the entire One-World.
I could not fathom such a number, nor could I imagine why the emperor of such an empire would fear anyone or anything. The gods must listen to him even when he whispered.
The air in the valley was not uncomfortable, but was cooler than the Land of the Maya. It was a place where one wore pants and a top, not just a loincloth.
I had never thought much about changes in weather before; though it gets hotter and wetter some months in my own land, it is always warm.
“Eternal spring,” the guard officer called it, with the temperature getting cooler as one went north and warmer going south.
Traveling north, for the first time I saw wide rivers, broad lakes, and tall mountains with snow.
Cenotes were not used, because there was plentiful water in lakes and rivers.
The causeways were crowded with people entering and leaving the city, from farmer families carrying in crops and goods made in the city out, to armies of porters loaded with goods—and tribute—from the four corners of the One-World.
As we entered, a herald blowing a horn warned the people on the causeway that a royal prince was coming. As on other crowded roads, everyone made way.
I should have felt a bit giddy—riding in a slave-carried litter behind the prince—but each step took me closer to the most powerful person in the entire One-World, who would no doubt discern that I was little more than an ignorant stoneworker.
As I was carried in the litter, I had time to think and wonder about the strange paths my feet have taken me since I fought the sacred beast. I also thought about the people of my village and wondered how they fared in this time of troubles in our land. Of course, they had heard stories about the “Jaguar Oracle.”
I chuckled to myself at the thought that the villagers were hearing tales that I sat beside the king and was spoon-fed the food of royals.
What did my friend Cuat and the others think now, when as a boy I competed against them in contests of who could spit and piss the farthest?
Eyo! What would they think when they heard that at the sight of me and hearing my lying tongue, the Aztec emperor painted me red and sent me to the temple priests to have the skin flayed off me while I was still alive?
Coming off the causeway, we went down wide streets and through squares and marketplaces the likes of which I had never seen.
The guard officer boasted that at the north side of Tenochtitlán was the great marketplace of Tlatelolco, which could have swallowed the entire city of Mayapán.
A marketplace bigger than Mayapán was too much for me to grasp, but remembering Sparrow’s accusation that I still had the mentality of a villager, I tried to look wise and thoughtful rather than gawk.
Which was hard.
I’d never imagined—let alone seen—such an incredible array of foods and goods in the marketplaces, which I now passed, divided into sections so that the gold workers were grouped in one, the silver shops in another section, precious stones in a third . . . feathers, mantles, embroidered goods, cloth weaving, makers of shoes and sandals, the skins of jaguars, other jungle beasts, otter, snakes, and deer; meat of chickens and ducks and birds; young dogs, venison, and fish; honey, timbers, firewood, even slaves in their own market. . . .
Eyo! Everything under the sun, and everything bigger and richer than what we had in Mayapán.
Yet for a peop
le famous for their power and ferocity, I saw also in their capital city a people dedicated to indulgence and privilege, perhaps more interested in decadent affluence and enjoying the spoils of war than in winning the wars themselves.
Observing the Aztecs’ vast wealth, I could not help but wonder whether the fruits of the Aztec conquests did not contain in them the seeds of that empire’s own destruction.
79
We entered the ceremonial center, with its stone palaces, pyramids, and temples. The most spectacular monument I saw was the 150-foot-high pyramid with a large temple atop honoring Huitzílopochtli, the God of War.
As we entered the emperor’s palace, I had a difficult time not ogling its grounds. Even the guard could not resist commenting on the prodigious pomp and elaborate luxury of the emperor’s abode. The size alone was incomprehensible, seeming to go on forever, more than eight hundred paces on each side.
“It’s a city in and of itself,” the guard officer told me as I stretched my legs after getting off the litter. The prince had gone into the palace to confer with his uncle, leaving me in the hands of guards.
“The House of Birds has every kind of avian variety found in the One-World,” he said.
The same was true for the House of Animals. I could hear the rasping roar of jaguars and the less powerful scream of pumas, the chatter of monkeys, and the shriek of birds.
“In the House of Javelins there is a great storeroom of shields, bows and arrows, swords and lances—enough to equip an army with the finest weapons. There are even shields that can be rolled up for easy carrying.”
The House of Books was in two parts, as was the library in Mayapán, but the size of each part dwarfed our entire building. One part was filled with the thousands of books of records needed to run the empire, from keeping track of taxes paid by nobles to tribute paid by other kings. The other books were of the One-World’s history and legends, including whatever wasn’t eaten by the Fire God when Tula was sacked.