cold skin. Now to make a rudimentary bandage…
I–
Was it just me, or was his wound no longer bleeding – the edges far closer together than they should have been?
The air was crisp and clear; I breathed it in, feeling it burning in my lungs, tingling against the mark in my hand. I'd expected to be down on my knees, struggling to remain conscious – as I had the last time I had visited a god's country.
But nothing happened: the land around me was verdant, endless marshes cut through with canals and streams. In the distance, I could barely make out ghostly silhouettes engaged in a ball-game: the dead who had drowned or died of suffocation, or of water-linked diseases, and who had found their final destination in Tlalocan.
Among the myriad destinations for the Dead, the land of the Blessed Drowned was a pleasant paradise – never lacking food or rain, the maize always blossoming on time, the reeds abundant. A warrior would have chafed, but for me, the son of peasants, the wet air reminded me of my faraway childhood spent on the edge of the lake, and even the ghostly boats passing each other in the canals brought familiar memories of rowing at night – when the sky darkened to two red lips above and below the horizon, and everything seemed to hang suspended on the edge of the Fifth World.
A hand shot out, and grabbed my ankle – I all but jumped up, before realising it was merely Acamapichtli, using me as a leverage to stand up. His face was still pale, but the wound I'd tied off was closed, sinking to nothing against his skin.
'You're lucky,' I said. 'Opening up an artery tends to be more fraught with consequences.'
He shrugged – characteristically careless and arrogant. 'Different rules.'
I shifted my cane in a squelch of mud. 'If you say so.' He had still spent the blood, regardless, and I very much doubted he would get
Acamapichtli grinned, unveiling teeth that seemed much sharper and yellower than before. 'We're not interlopers here, Acatl. I asked the god for His permission, and He has granted it to us.'
'Great,' I said. Even with the god's permission, I still felt drained. I leant on the cane, watching the hill. It rippled under the wind, and…
Wait a moment. 'That's not grass,' I said. It rippled and flexed in the breeze, as green as the tail feathers of quetzal birds – pockmarked with thousands of raised dots, swept through with yellow and brown marbling.
Lizard skin.
Acamapichtli grinned again, an expression I was starting to thoroughly dislike. 'Of course not. Come on. The god is up there.'
Of course. Gingerly, I set out; when the cane touched the skin, I felt a resistance – not at all what I'd expected from grass or earth. It smelled… musty, like dried skins, and it bounced under our steps with alarming regularity. As we climbed higher past the darker streaks, I caught sight of folds and sharper patches – places where one set of skin overrode another – darker patches with the splayed shapes of claws, and larger pockmarks, and almond-shaped holes where the eyes should have been, opening only on blind earth. I didn't even want to know how many lizards had died to make up the hill.
It would have been an arduous climb, even had we both been fit – which neither of us was. I leant on my cane, and though Acamapichtli arrogantly strode ahead, he was pale-faced, controlling the trembling of his hands only through an effort of will: I could see the quiver in his fingers, quickly masked.
We didn't speak and the only sounds were flocks of herons, wheeling around us with harsh cries, and the distant sound of thunder, like the roaring of jaguars. As we crested a ridge about halfway up, we saw Tlalocan spread out under us, a mass of green and yellow shimmering in the sunlight, the distant rectangles of Floating Gardens interspersed with canals, with the shades of drowned peasants harvesting maize from the eternally ripe sheaves of corn, forever happy in Tlaloc's paradise.
The thunder peals got louder and, as we ascended on the path, storm-clouds moved to cover the sky, darkening the air all around us. I glanced at Acamapichtli, but he was still looking stubbornly ahead.
Tlaloc had given His permission, which meant we walked here without gagging or shedding flesh, but that didn't mean He wasn't saving things for later. I remembered the last time I'd seen the god in the Fifth World: the shadowy figure perched on the shoulder of his child agent; His fanged mouth level with the child's ears; the voice that had shaken like thunder; the words that dripped poison after poison – and I, sinking down with my brother's body in my arms, desperately struggling to come up, to breathe air again…
Ahead, the path flared; the texture of the ground under our feet had subtly changed. I paused to catch my breath and saw the curling pattern beneath us: a single skin going all the way to the top, and…
Outlined against the darkened sky were the head and jaws of a huge snake, its crown of feathers ruffled in the rising wind, its eyes the same bright red as Acamapichtli's blood, its fangs shining like pearls in the muck.
Acamapichtli was already headed towards the snake; I followed after taking the time to catch my breath – gods, how I hated that every step seemed to cost me, that even lifting the cane seemed to quench the breath in my lungs.
A familiar litany for the Dead was running in my mind – though my patron god Mictlantecuhtli wasn't there, couldn't ever be there.
The snake was half-sunk within the earth, its head facing the sky and the storm-clouds – so that its open jaws formed a cave. The higher ring of fangs looked as though they'd clamp shut any moment, and the lower ring was pierced through in the centre, leaving a space just large enough for a man to squeeze through, so that Acamapichtli and I had to enter single file, instinctively bowed, as if to protect ourselves against the fall of the huge teeth glinting above us.
Inside, it was dark and cool, smelling faintly of moist earth, with the pungent aftertaste of copal incense, a smell that clung to the inside of my mouth and throat as if I'd smelled nothing else for days and days – as I might have, for who knew what time the gods considered Their own?
'Ah, Acamapichtli,' a voice said. I'd expected it to be sombre, vindictive – the way I still remembered it in my nightmares – yet while it was deep, reverberating in the darkness, there was nothing in it but mild interest, the same one a priest might have shown to an unexpected pilgrim. 'What a pleasure to see you.'
