leave.
Stuart turned his attention to the outer walls. They were impossible to climb. The battlements were too high to be reached by any kind of grappling device, and the stonework was pure traditional Aztec — slabs of basalt cut so precisely and wedged together so tightly that you couldn’t insert even a sheet of paper between them, never mind a piton or a fingertip. You’d have to be some kind of human spider to have any hope of scaling the walls successfully, and all the while you’d be inviting the Serpents in the watchtowers to take potshots at you. They were elite troops, the best of the best, cherry-picked from the ranks of Eagles and Jaguars all over the world. You could be sure that whatever they aimed at, they would not miss.
“Come on,” said Zotz. “We can’t stay here much longer. Serpent discs make regular sweeps along the lakeshore. Besides, we’re losing the light.”
“Sun’s still well above the horizon,” Stuart commented.
“You forget, Englishman, this is the tropics. When the sun goes down, it goes down fast.”
Stuart took one last look at Tenochtitlan, hoping against hope that he would find some gap in its defences, some chink in its armour of stonework and sentry. Perched in the middle of an inland sea, it was like a castle with an immense moat. Its army of protectors were disciplined and dedicated, and had the highest wage packet known in professional soldiering, with substantial bonuses awarded for exceptional initiative or diligence in the line of duty. The Great Speaker was ensconced in a remote, impenetrable bastion. He ventured out from it only on rare occasions, and outsiders could not get in unless they were invited, expected, and fully accredited.
So how on earth did Chel think Xibalba could pull off an assassination?
The question rattled around in Stuart’s brain as he followed Zotz back through the forest to their canoe. Chel claimed to have the basic ingredients of a plan, but Stuart had wanted to reconnoitre Tenochtitlan to assess the parameters of the situation first-hand before making any sort of commitment. If he was going to throw in his lot with Xibalba, he had to be satisfied that it would be a worthwhile exercise. No point jumping off the fence if there was nowhere to land.
On present evidence, Xibalba stood a cat’s chance in hell of killing the Great Speaker. Assuming they managed to get inside Tenochtitlan somehow, in terms of numbers, materiel and strategic capability they were no match for the Serpent Warriors. It wouldn’t even be a suicide mission, because that would imply the desired outcome could be achieved through sacrifice of lives. It would just be plain suicide.
Stuart and Zotz reached the edge of one of the tributary rivers that fed into Lake Texcoco. Their kapok-wood canoe was where they’d left it — hauled ashore and secreted among undergrowth. They slid it out onto the water and unshipped the paddles. There was an outboard, but they wouldn’t use that until later. A sudden burst of engine noise might attract attention.
The thin, flat-bottomed boat glided along against the sluggish current, propelled by its two oarsmen with slow, easy strokes. The sky purpled quickly and dusk fell, and the forest animals set up their usual nocturnal hullabaloo, as if this was the cue they had been waiting for. As the stars came out, everything with lungs and a throat started to shriek, gibber or howl, while everything that had chitinous body parts to scrape together started to chirp, all at deafening volume.
Zotz switched on a powerful lamp affixed to the canoe’s bows to light their way. Instantly a pair of eyes shone from the darkness of the riverbank. They disappeared from sight as the creature that owned them padded its way into the water and slithered under the surface with a just audible splash.
“Caiman,” said Zotz. “Didn’t look too big. Nine, maybe ten feet long.”
“Ten feet sounds big enough to me,” Stuart said. “Any danger to us?”
“Not unless it attacks.”
“But it won’t attack a boat.”
“Not unless it thinks the boat is a rival caiman coming to take over its territory or steal its mate.”
“How do we know it won’t think that?”
“We don’t. Just paddle.”
Zotz might have been joking. It was impossible to tell. The Mayan was a man of few words, with a set to his chin that suggested he didn’t suffer fools gladly and thought most people were fools. Stuart quite liked him. He wasn’t sure whether Zotz liked him back, but was proceeding on the assumption that he didn’t. Possibly Zotz regarded him as a rival, someone who might usurp his position as Chel’s right-hand man. Stuart could have assured him he needn’t worry on that front. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have anything to do with Xibalba at all. He owed the Mayan guerrillas a debt of gratitude, but beyond that, nothing.
As he and Zotz continued to plough their way upriver, Stuart recalled another night-time journey over water, made just four days earlier.
The Xibalba van, damaged by ramming the paddy wagon side-on, just made it to Woolwich before the engine let out a wheezing groan and expired. The guerrillas dashed through the docklands, Stuart with them, until they arrived at a jetty where a small fishing vessel was waiting. The boat’s French captain, Beaudreau, cast off straight away, and they were soon chugging along Barking Reach, past the bleak tufted wastes of Hornchurch Marshes, out towards open sea.
Dry clothes were found for Stuart — a set of fisherman’s overalls — and as he stood at the taffrail and watched London recede in the boat’s wake he wondered when, if ever, he would return to the city. Perhaps never. How could he go back? He was a marked man now. There could be no more doubt who the Conquistador was. His life as a masked vigilante was over, and likewise his life as an obsidian importer. At a stroke, he had become an exile. From here on, Stuart Reston was a fugitive, a perpetual expatriate, forever on the run.
Chel joined him at the stern as the fishing vessel entered the chop and surf of the North Sea and began rounding the coastline of Kent.
“We were keeping an eye on you,” he said. “I thought you might be needing us at some point, once the Jaguars started taking an interest. It was careless, letting that detective woman outmanoeuvre you the way she did.”
“Maybe I knew all along I had Mayan guardian angels. Maybe I was relying on you coming to my rescue.”
“Maybe. Still, she got past your defences. You underestimated her.”
“Implying I was seduced.”
“Beguiled.”
“By the person who gave me this?” Stuart pointed to the fresh bruise that was swelling on his cheek, overlaying the bruise Vaughn had put there the previous day. “I don’t think so.”
“You should put her out of your mind anyway. That’s all over for you now. For better or worse, you’re with us.”
“For the time being.”
Chel made a dismissive gesture.
Overnight they crossed the Channel, reaching the port of Saint-Malo at dawn the next day. Captain Beaudreau was part of a French resistance network that had been conducting a campaign of passive, surly dissent for a couple of hundred years, ever since imperial annexation. They called themselves the Louisiens, after the monarch who chose to abdicate rather than rule a country that had just capitulated to the Empire. King Louis XVI was arrested at Marseilles attempting to steal away on a schooner bound for Malta. He was guillotined in the Place de l’Entente at the end of the Champs-Elysees before a throng of Parisian well-wishers who showered him with rose petals as he stepped from the tumbrel onto the scaffold. In revenge for this act of mass insubordination, a contingent of Jaguar Warriors, at the behest of newly anointed High Priest Napoleon Bonaparte, rounded up everyone in the square and put them to the guillotine as well.
The massacre had embedded itself in the French consciousness, festering there like an infected splinter. A certain element in the country refused to forget it. The Louisiens made sure that the hieratic caste didn’t have an easy time. They achieved this mostly by obstructing theocracy with bureaucracy. Edicts from the Palais Bourbon were seldom implemented in full and never with any haste. Sometimes the wheels of power turned so slowly they seemed to be standing still. Systematically and unobtrusively, a whole sector of the populace made it their role in life to collaborate as little as they could with their leaders while still staying the right side of outright noncompliance. Probably in no other country could this nuanced state of affairs have been achievable, and certainly nowhere but France could it have been carried out with the same sense of sangfroid.
