I forced my attention back to the huetlacoatls below me, but as I turned something flew past my shoulder into the huetlacoatl pit. They shifted and honked nervously. Then a hand of bananas landed close to the first object, a red-and-green mango. I turned to see four or five other people crowding up against the rail, male and female and most dressed in the plain tunics of commoners. They were chanting prayers and throwing fruit into the pit like worshipers at a shrine. Some of them were rocking back and forth with their eyes closed, as if in ecstasy.
Two of the menagerie attendants came running up, shouting at the congregation and waving their staffs of office. They laid into the little group of worshipers with the heavy mahogany sticks, sending them scattering and screaming. One guard struck a young woman across the kidneys. The woman stumbled toward me, and the attendant caught her a glancing blow on the side of the head. The woman tried to run, but the guard was almost on top of her, striking again and again with his stick.
I waited until she staggered by me and casually shifted my stance. The guard tripped over my foot and went sprawling face-first into the dirt. While he was down, I took the young woman’s arm and motioned toward the alley between the pens with my eyes. In spite of the blood running down her cheek she smiled and darted off. I turned my attention to helping the attendant to his feet. By the time he shook off my ministrations, the girl and the others had vanished.
Meanwhile, other attendants had entered the pit and were busy gathering up the offerings. They scurried among the huetlacoatls’ huge clawed feet, ducking beneath the great tails to grab the smashed remnants of fruit. The huetlacoatls were still nervous and any second I expected to see an attendant smashed as flat as that first mango.
There was a low whistle over my right shoulder. All four of the beasts below me jerked upright as if on a string. Their heads swiveled toward me and they pushed closer to the wall. Instinctively I took a step back and groped under my cloak for my sword.
“It’s all right,” someone said. I turned and there was an old man. He was wearing a dirty cloak with the three lines of feathers of the middle nobility and leaning on a heavy, carved stick. “They’re just looking for me. Aren’t you, my pretties?” At the sound of his voice all the huetlacoatls began to whistle and hiss.
He stumped to the parapet and looked down. The animals pressed against the wall and craned their necks even higher. He leaned out at a dangerous angle and reached down with his stick to scratch the tallest ones on their muzzles. “How are we today?” he crooned. “All healthy and happy?” The smaller ones were making little leaps to try to bring their muzzles within range of his cane.
“Magnificent, aren’t they?” he asked without taking his eyes from them. “I’m their mother, you know.”
He glanced sideways to see if the statement had the desired effect.
“It must have been a difficult labor, Uncle.”
He cackled at the thought. All the while the cane tip kept caressing the monsters in the pit.
“I raised them from eggs,” he said as he straightened up to the audible disappointment of his “children.” “I was the first thing they saw when they hatched and I stayed with them night and day when they were in the nest, fed them chewed-up leaves. When they were older they followed me everywhere. Oh yes, they are my children.”
“You know them well? The huetlacoatls, I mean.”
His face cracked into an improbable smile. “As well as anyone. I am Foureagle, the keeper of the Emperor’s animals.”
“What can you tell me about the huetlacoatls?”
“More than you want to know, young one. Or would believe if I told you.”
“Would you share your wisdom with me,” I made a quick mental judgment, “over a bowl of pulque?”
Again the smile. “Lead on, young sir.”
A grog seller had his cart, brightly painted with many portraits of Lady Maya-huel, the inventor of the sacred drink, just outside the gates of the menagerie. I purchased a couple of gourds, received a perfunctory blessing, and Foureagle and I settled in the shade with our backs to the wall. The old man took a long, deep pull, wiped his mouth and sighed lustily.
“Those damn fools,” he said, jerking his head to indicate where the fruit-throwers had been. “They don’t understand that those beasts can’t digest fruit. It makes them sick.”
“Is that why they throw it?”
He snorted. “They think they are worshiping them, making offerings to the avatars of their gods. What they’re really doing is killing the poor things-if we don’t stop them.” He took another swig from his gourd. “All this whoring after new gods, young sir. No good can come of it.”
I nodded gravely, as if the old man had said something profound. “But of the huetlacoatls themselves, what can you tell me of them?”
“Ah,” he sighed and took another pull. “They thrive only down on Viru, you know,” he said by way of a beginning. “Only there. They do not do well here, just as man does not prosper there.”
“The ones here,” I gestured to the menagerie behind us, “seem to do well enough.”
“Only because we care for them,” the old man said. “It took generations for us to learn how to do so.
There are many kinds, and each has subtly different needs. That pen the duckbills are in, for example: it would not do for the longnecks, nor the spike-tails. And if you tried to keep the big meat-eaters in there, they’d be out and among the visitors in less than a day-cycle.” Another pull on the gourd. “Those meat-eaters can jump.”
“Do they share a common language?”
Again the cackle. “The ones here? They are mere beasts. The huetlacoatl version of deer and jaguar.
Only the talking huetlacoatls are intelligent in the way of man.”
Shit! An afternoon wasted. I had never thought of the huetlacoatls as intelligent in the sense that men are intelligent, but I assumed they were more than beasts.
“They were unknown to us until we reached the southern lands,” said Foureagle. “They are big, powerful, and strange, so men try to worship them.”
“Do they ever sacrifice them?”
The old man snorted. “Here? To what end? Their blood will not aid our corn, nor can their deaths help keep the balance with our Gods. They are of an older creation, a different order of magic, if you believe in such things.”
“So you have never heard of one being sacrificed?”
“On this continent? Never.”
“I have heard it said that they carry powerful medicine within them. Valuable medicine.”
The old man looked at me sharply. “Who told you such nonsense? Inside a huetlacoatl is nothing but bone, guts, and muscle, just like a deer, or a man. I should know. I have seen the inside of enough of all of them.”
“Nothing worth cutting one open for, then?”
Again the sharp look. “I did not say that. There is knowledge to be gained.”
A kind of divination?“Knowledge of the future?”
“Shit, no! Knowledge of the huetlacoatls. How they work. And how they are related to us.”
“We are relatives?”
“Not close. They are closer to lizards and snakes, and closer yet to crocodiles and birds. But yes, we are related as all animals are related.” He sucked his gourd dry and looked at me expectantly.
“Allow me to provide you with another,” I said, rising to return to the vendor’s cart for fresh gourds of the milky brew.
While the vendor refilled the gourds, I pondered what Foureagle had told me. By the time I returned I had my new line of questions framed and ready.
“It is said,” I began when the old man raised his nose from the gourd again, “that a priest can tell the future from the entrails of a deer.”Or a man. “Could a priest not do the same from the entrails of one of these?”
“It is said that in England men are born with prehensile toes to better grip the earth so that they may not fall off it,” he retorted. “Even those who believe such things know that like calls to like. Better to read the entrails of a chicken, unless you wish to know what portends on the southern continent.”
“And yet…”
“And yet you seek after phantoms,” the old man said, pouring the last of his pulque on the ground and levering himself erect. “You treat these things as if they were supernatural, not of this world. They are not, I can assure you. They are of the same world and the same flesh as we are. Older, it is true. Far older, but there is nothing miraculous to be had from them. Now I thank you for your generosity, young sir, but if you will excuse me I will seek a quiet place to piss.”
