pavilion where my host awaited.
Toltectecuhtli was large, paunchy, middle-aged, and as much of a mixture as the temple he presided over. His head was flattened, Frog-fashion, until he looked like a painting on a Frog temple wall rather than a human being. His lip and ears had been pierced for the heavy jade spools the Frogs favored, but the holes were empty. He wore a green-feathered short cloak that covered his shoulders and came within a finger’s breadth of being blasphemy against the priests of Quetzalcoatl. His tunic was snowy white set off with gold bangles and a stomacher of lizard skin, and a beaten gold pectoral depicting Lord Quetzalcoatl hung from his neck. His eyes were permanently crossed but that didn’t add to his beauty.
The whole effect combined the barbaric, foreign, and modern in a way that was not in the least laughable.
He sat rigid as a statue on a carved stool, staring out over the rooftops at the city and the bay beyond.
Wordlessly he gestured me to a seat on the step below him, and wordlessly I took it. He kept his gaze on the horizon as I kept mine on him. Although he never turned his face toward me I got the feeling he was sizing me up just as carefully as I was sizing up him.
“Tworabbit,” he said at last, in a voice as distant as his gaze. The name startled me. It was my natal name and should have been my everyday name, save that it was notoriously unlucky.
“I am called Lucky,” I said quietly.
He turned and suddenly focused hard and sharp as a hunting hawk on me. That unblinking crossed stare gave me the feeling he could see all the way inside me to the black nodules of my inmost soul. A nice trick, that stare.
“Do not discard what you are,” he said sharply. “For it is what you are in the beginning that determines what you will become in the end.”
“If the fates allow.”
“Ah yes, fate.” He was silent for an instant. “You represent a noble branch of a fine clan,” he continued.
“Brought low by unfortunate circumstances.”
I said nothing. If this one was trying to unsettle me…well, I had been played upon by masters.
“I owe you thanks,” he said at last. “You helped someone two days ago.”
I shrugged. “The attendant was clumsy. He tripped over his own feet.”
“Still, thanks are in order. And a seeker of wisdom you have become.”
I shrugged. “Anything that turns a profit.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he snapped. “Profit is not what drives you.”
“Not entirely,” I said as I thought of the small casket beside my bed.
He smiled in a particularly unsettling manner. “Nor revenge either, much as you would like that believed.
No, you seek wisdom, albeit you do not do so wisely.”
I licked my lips and wondered where this one got his information. “What would be the wise way to seek wisdom?”
“There is no wise way,” he said. “Wise ways are for cowards, fools, and those who do not seek to know. Wisdom is found by treading unwise paths.”
I wondered if the extreme skull binding had affected his brain somehow. This “priest” appeared more than half mad, but if it was madness it was combined with an unusual force of character.
“The cycle closes, Tworabbit,” he said. “Venus will not cross the sun thrice before the Monkey Baktun draws to a close.”
“The cycle dies as all things must.” It was the first thing that came into my mind.
He made a dismissive gesture. “That it dies is unimportant. How it is reborn is all that matters. For that is in our hands. Each time the cycle turns we have it in our power to re-create the world entire. To bring together the elements that are tearing our world apart and to form them together as a potter forms clay.
To temper them in the fires of the end times until the new world emerges whole and unbroken.”
“I had thought that was in the hands of the Gods,” I said carefully.
“The Gods do not play dice with the world,” the priest said sharply. “They show man the path and each cycle they offer him the chance anew to take it. That we do not is our own doing.”
This conversation had started off peculiar and it had gotten weirder and weirder. “You wished to see me,” I said, hoping to force the talk back to a path that made sense.
Again that stare like a cross-eyed hawk. “And I have seen you. The cycle turns, Tworabbit, and neither you nor I can escape our place upon the calendar stone of fate. Now is the time to weld together all the elements so they may be mixed as potter’s clay.”
This part vaguely reminded me of some of the street-corner priests of the English Quarter. “You mean nobles and commoners?”
“Oh, more than that, Tworabbit. Far more than that. Nobles, commoners, Reeds and Frogs, Englishmen and others, yes, even the huetlacoatl. To create a thing transcending anything the world has ever seen. A new being for a new cycle.”
“That would be a thing to be seen,” I said as neutrally as I could.
“And it will be seen, Tworabbit, if we all play the parts we are destined to play.”
This wasn’t just weird anymore. It had started to remind me of those conversations one had with one’s age mates at noble parties. Conversations where nothing was stated, no matter how bright the surface, and much was implied: threats, offers, information swapping, all wrapped up in inconsequential talk. Only here I didn’t know the language or understand symbolism. Was I being offered something? Was I being threatened? Was I being pumped for information? It was like one of those dreams where Smoke came to talk to me about his skin. Just as bizarre and just as menacing.
“If we are destined to, then we shall play those parts.” Not much in the way of snappy repartee, but it was the best I could do without knowing what the hell was going on here.
This time the stare held me even longer, as if Toltectecuhtli tried to pin me to my cushion by the force of his eyes. “See that you play your part well, Tworabbit. Play it well indeed.”
“Forgive me, uncle, but I do not know what my part is.”
“That is because your part is ignorance, Tworabbit. Cling to that ignorance. Cherish it. Profess it to all who ask. That is your part.”
Then he looked back out over the sea and I waited for him to speak again until the temple virgin touched my shoulder to tell me the interview was at an end.
As I left the temple, I paused at the bottom of the stairs. The frieze showed a polyglot of symbols. There was Quetzalcoatl in both his Reed and Frog aspects. There were human forms representing all ranks and stations. There were signs of the zodiac and the glyph for the end of the cycle. And mixed in with it all were stylized huetlacoatls, running, walking, commanding, and lying in repose. Here and there were the conventional symbols for the burden of time, but instead of burdens or the traditional monsters, these glazed brick figures of humans were locked in the embrace of huetlacoatls. There was something vaguely erotic about their posture, and much more that bordered on the obscene.
As I made my way down the street to the cable car stop, I pondered Toltectecuhtli and his religion. New religions weren’t anything out of the ordinary, especially here in the south where the Mexica Reeds mixed with the native Frogs and the regime of the priests was not as strict as it was back in the Valley of Anahuac by the shores of the Lakes of Mexico. I had heard vaguely of the Toltec and his followers, but I had classed them as another huetlacoatl-worshiping cult. Wrong. Even though Toltec was definitely concerned with the huetlacoatls, he was not a huetlacoatl worshiper. It was a lot more complex than that and tied in with the coming end of the cycle.
If I had more than my usual share of luck I might live to see the end of the cycle. It was two hand-spans of fingers and a finger away. Not the Great Cycle, when the Universe is re-created, but the smallest of the great cycles, the Baktun, or 394 and a half English years. Baktun 13, the Grass Baktun. A time when the world, or man’s part of it, was traditionally broken apart and remade new. I was no student of religion, much less of ephemeral cults, but I couldn’t ever remember one that tied the huetlacoatls to the end of the cycle before.
Every cycle’s end brought with it prophecies of doom of one sort or another. In the time of the Emperor Montezuma they had seemed fulfilled when the first English had landed and stirred rebellion among the subject tribes. But the English had succumbed to the Empire’s might and when the English came again years later it was the English English, not the Spanish English, and they built English Town as traders rather than conquerors. Eventually Montezuma’s successor, Montezuma V,the Emperor Montezuma of popular legend, had welded the
