The Demon of the Air Read Free Page B

steps.
    â€œIt’s a lie,” he said quietly. “Bathed Slaves go to the Land of the Dead, like everyone else.”
    When he smiled his teeth showed white among the shadows of his face.

    â€œJust tell the old man,” he said.
    I dived for his feet, almost going over myself as I crashed onto the stones where he had been—but he had taken his last step and was lying, broken, far below me.

3
    S o much has happened since the days when the priests sacrificed to the gods at the summit of the Great Pyramid. No doubt the old ways now seem strange and barbaric, and people wonder what it was all about, and why so many had to die under the Fire Priest’s flint knife.
    This is what we were taught.
    The World had been destroyed four times: by ravening jaguars, by the wind, by a rain of fire and by a flood. Each time the people had perished or been transformed beyond recognition, and so after the flood, at the beginning of the present age, the gods had to repopulate the Earth.
    After the last catastrophe one of their number, Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, went down into Hell to gather up the bones of the dead. However, even after he had retrieved them and had them ground up into powder, there was still no life in them. He had to slit his member and add his own blood to the powder to make a paste from which the first man and woman could be molded, and the other gods had to do likewise. The gods gave us life with their blood, and our debt to them could only be repaid with blood.
    What is more, we believed that without the daily tribute of human hearts, the Sun would not move. This part of the story went like this: after men and women had been created, the World was still in darkness, and so the gods gathered to re-create the Sun. They built a great fire and called on a splendid, richly adorned god to leap into it
to be burned and reborn as the Sun. However, the fire was too hot, and while this magnificent god shrank from the fierce flames, the despised, wizened, pimply and disgusting god Nanahuatzin leaped past him into the inferno. As Nanahuatzin’s flesh blistered in the fire, shame overcame the splendid god’s fear and he jumped into the blaze as well. Nanahuatzin became the Sun and his magificent rival, the Moon. At first each was as bright as the other, but the other gods threw a rabbit in the Moon’s face to dim his light, and we see the rabbit’s shape on the Moon’s face to this day.
    Now the Sun and the Moon had been born, but they would not rise. They sat on the horizon, wobbling uncertainly, until the remaining gods sacrificed themselves to give them the energy they needed to move through the sky. Quetzalcoatl cut the other gods’ hearts out, throwing them into the fire before leaping into it himself. Then the first day began, thanks to the self-sacrifice of the gods, and we believed we had to follow their example, for if the gods were denied their feast of human hearts and blood, then the World would end.
    But we were like gods ourselves! No Aztec, not even the Emperor, believed himself to be a god, but we and the gods were partners in the struggle to sustain the Sun in his progress through the sky. Why else had the gods elevated our city over all others, to be the greatest in the World? Why else were our armies sent forth, but to gather captives for the Flowery Death, as we called it? Why else did we join in the gods’ feasting, eating the flesh of those who died on the killing stone while the gods were consuming their hearts?
    We gave our own blood freely enough, and all Aztecs took part in this, piercing our earlobes whenever we were called upon to repay a little of what we owed. Priests used to go further, slitting their tongues and penises with obsidian knives and drawing ropes through them, and presenting the bloodied ropes as a mark of their devotion. But the most precious offering, the gift of hearts that made the Sun rise, came mostly from captive enemy warriors