the grief that now burnt through me.
The buildings were adobe, no longer stark white or wavering; the feeling of oppression had disappeared. I pushed myself to my feet, and met Mazahuatl's gaze. The young warrior was standing in the doorway, staring at the place where his mother had disappeared. Even with the memory of Xilonen's light clouding my sight, I could tell his dark aura had vanished. I could guess that Citli would walk to his sacrifice and join the Sun God in the heavens, and that Mazahuatl would receive his promotion.
I did not care.
“Mother?” Mazahuatl asked.
“Remember her,” I said.
I made my unsteady way through the courtyard, passed the gates, and found myself in a deserted street. It was not seemly that a priest for the Dead should grieve, or have regrets. It was not seemly to cry, either.
I stood alone in the street, staring at the stars, and saw them slowly blur as tears ran down my cheeks.
Safe, Child, Safe
First published in
I knew something was wrong with the child as soon as his father brought him to me.
He was perhaps four, five years old, and everything about him was high-born Mexica: his tunic of cotton embroidered with leaping deer; his skin the colour of cacao bean; his hair as dark as congealed blood. He lay on the reed mat in my temple, shivering; his feverish eyes turned to me and yet did not see me.
That was not what made the hairs on my nape rise.
No, what made me pause was what I saw clinging to his hands and feet: a green, pulsing aura that brought with it the smell of rotting leaves and mouldy earth. The aura of Mictlan, the underworld.
Living things did not have the aura. Dead things, yes, but then they should have been in the underworld, not here among mortals. And with dead things the aura wrapped the whole body, not just the extremities.
I looked up at the father, who for the whole duration of my examination had stood in a corner, dwarfed by the frescoes of Tezcatlipoca, God of War and Fate. His face was pale. Yaotl of the Atempan
“We thought it… it might be a spell,” Yaotl said. “That you'd help.”
“I'm a priest for the Dead,” I told him gently, smoothing the hair on the boy's forehead. “The only magic I have is to usher the souls of the dead into the underworld.” And other things, too, most notably making sure that nothing of the underworld came back among us. “Why bring him here, rather than to the Great Temple?”
Yaotl shook his head. “The priests at the Great Temple are too obsessed with their sacrifices. They don't care about human lives.”
Human lives, as I knew all too well from numerous funeral wakes, were worth nothing. Death was cheap, and caught us all, often giving little warning as to its coming. But this – the purplish, clenched lips, the pale face, the shaking fingers – this wasn't a death I'd have wished on anyone, much less a child. “How long has he been like this?” I asked.
“One week,” Yaotl said. “Chimalli woke up one morning and refused to get up. He said that he was cold. We thought he'd caught a sickness at first. The doctor at the marketplace prescribed sweat baths, but they didn't help. He wouldn't eat, wouldn't leave his sleeping mat. He just… dwindled away.”
The boy Chimalli's head came up, the eyes suddenly trained on me with a disturbing intensity. “Leave me alone,” he whispered, and his voice echoed as though in a great room.
I shivered. Beside me, Yaotl had gone pale, his face showing a sickly fear unbecoming a warrior, but I didn't blame him. Even during my long career banishing underworld monsters I had seldom seen a gaze so… wrong. Living, and yet stripped of human feelings.
Chimalli's eyes had closed again. I moved cautiously away from him, not eager to repeat the experience. “I'll tell you what I see,” I said to Yaotl. “He has the aura of the underworld, though he's still alive.”
“Dying, then,” Yaotl said curtly. Not a muscle in his face moved. A true warrior to the end.
“No,” I said. “The dying don't have this aura. I think he's somehow cursed.” I was about to say that I could do nothing to help, when my gaze rested on Chimalli. Four years old. He had outgrown most of the diseases that took their toll on babies and toddlers. His life should have been ahead of him, and yet… “Can you take me to where he sleeps?”
Yaotl nodded. His face still bore no expression, but there was something else, a glimmer in his eyes. I thought it might be hope.
Unsure of what I would find, I armed myself before I left: two obsidian knives went into my belt. I also took a jade and turquoise pectoral of Quetzatcoatl, the Feathered Serpent god, He who had once descended into the underworld to save mankind. It was poor protection against a curse, but without living blood I would not be able to do more.
Yaotl did not speak as we left my temple and headed towards his house. He held Chimalli's hand: the boy followed where he was pulled, but appeared to have no will of his own, like a sacrificial victim drunk on peyotl and led towards the bloody altar.
This, if anything, was creepier than the rest – a wrongness that gave pause even to the passersby.
At this early hour in the afternoon, the streets of Coyoacan were full of people, from peasants in loincloths to priests in tunics and rich cloaks, their hair matted with dried blood.
As we walked, I tried to think on what or whom might have cursed Chimalli. He was young and vulnerable: a target for many monsters, whether supernatural or human.
