Acamapichtli had removed his sandals and set them aside; and he was crouching, his eyes on the ground – not grovelling, as he might have done before the Revered Speaker, but still showing plenty of respect. I crouched next to him, setting my sandals aside.
'And you brought company, too,' Tlaloc said. He spoke in accents similar to the Texcocan ones, reminding me incongruously of Nezahual-tzin – or perhaps my mind superimposed the accent afterwards, struggling for a human equivalent to the speech of the gods.
'My Lord.' I looked down and did not move, not even when footsteps echoed under the ceiling of the cave, and a shadow fell over me.
Tlaloc laughed, and it was thunder over the lake. 'Oh, do get up. I'm not Huitzilpochtli, and there is no need for ceremony, not for high priests.'
Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself upwards with the help of my cane, and looked at Tlaloc.
He was tall, impossibly so, towering over us in the dim light – but then all gods were, especially in Their own lands. I caught only glimpses of His aspect: a quetzal-feather headdress streaming in the wind like unbound hair, fangs glistening in a huge mouth, a cloak that shifted and shone with the iridescence of a thousand raindrops, before I looked down. He was the rain and the thunder: savage, cruel and wild; one of the Old Ones who had been there since the First Age. Staring straight at Him would have been like looking at the face of the Fifth Sun.
'You know why we are here,' Acamapichtli said.
'I know you are desperate,' Tlaloc said. 'Not many people come offering heart's blood.' A touch of malice crept into His voice. 'As your companion said, you are lucky not to have lost the hand, or worse.'
'I live for Your favour.'
Again, that terrible laughter – thunder and rain, and the sounds of a storm heard from a boat adrift on the lake. 'We both know you don't.'
Acamapichtli didn't move. 'I respect Your power, and Your will.'
'Yes. That you do.'
I hadn't spoken up – I had to steer this conversation back to its proper goal, or they would be talking to each other for hours to come. But the prospect of doing so, to have Tlaloc's undivided attention fixated on me, was enough to cause nausea in the pit of my stomach.
What in the Fifth World had possessed me to come here?
'My Lord,' I said. My voice was shaking; I quelled it, as best as I could. 'There is an epidemic in the city.'
Even looking at the ground, I
'It concerns us all,' I said. The pressure around me was growing worse. Now I knew why Acamapichtli had gone so strangely inarticulate.
'Unless it is Your divine will,' Acamapichtli said, from some faraway place.
This time, Tlaloc's laughter seemed to course through me – through my ears and into my ribcage, lifting my heart clear of the chest and squeezing it until it bled. The ground rose up to meet me,and I fell down – pain radiating from my left knee, echoing the frantic beat within my chest.
'My will? You know nothing about My will, save what you see in the Fifth World.'
'I need to know…' Acamapichtli's voice drifted from very far away, but I was too weary to focus on anything but the grooves in the ground under my hands, and my cane – lying discarded some distance away.
'Know what?' Tlaloc's voice was mocking again.
'If we're setting ourselves against You.' His words fell, one by one, into the open maws of silence.
'What a dutiful High Priest,' Tlaloc said, at last. 'Your companion, of course, isn't so enthusiastic.' I'd expected malice, but it was a simple statement of fact.
'He's often a fool.' Acamapichtli's voice came from somewhere above me. 'But he means well.'
I managed to move – pulling myself into a foetal position, and then raising my head up. Acamapichtli's bare feet seemed to be the only things within my field of vision. 'Are we – setting – ourselves against – Your wife?' Each word, like raw chillies, seemed to leave a burning trail at the back of my throat.
There was a pause. 'No,' Tlaloc said. 'You're not setting yourself against either Me or My wife.'
'Someone – is using Her magic.' I managed to extend my hands towards the cane, hooking the wood with trembling fingers – and haltingly started to bring it back towards me. If I could get up, if I–
'Yes.' Tlaloc did not offer any more information – and Acamapichtli, the Duality curse him, didn't seem inclined to question this further.
'I don't understand.'
The air tightened around me again. 'There is nothing to understand.'
And there was something – a familiar tone to the voice, even though it was deeper and stronger than any human voice: an emotion I'd heard all too many times.
'My Lord–'
'There is nothing to understand, priest. Now leave.' And there it was again: something I ought to have been able to put a name to, but with only the voice to go on, I might as well have been blind and deaf. Something was wrong. Something–
I needed to see – even if it burned my eyes, I needed to see His face.
The cane was almost within my reach… A last flick of my fingers brought it spinning towards me, raising a cloud of dust from the packed earth of the cave – and a sudden whiff of copal incense from the wood, a smell that didn't belong in Tlalocan, neither in the verdant marshes, nor in this dark and humid cave.
Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself up – my hands were shaking worse than ever, and I had to stop and start again more times than I could count. And of course, neither Tlaloc nor Acamapichtli offered any help. 'If not Your wife,' I said, slowly, 'then who is it?'
And, shaking, I raised my eyes towards the hulking shape of the god, catching a glimpse of blue-streaked skin, pocked with dots, of a necklace of jade beads around His neck, each as big as a human skull, of two snakes on either side of the jaw, climbing upwards through the darkened cheeks, their tails wrapped around the eyes in perfect black circles – the eyes…
