Days of the Dead (11 page)

January shook his head. “I am only a surgeon,” he replied. “And for ten years, owing to the prejudices of the white men against my race, I have made my living as a musician and a teacher of music. I’ve seen lunatics, of course, and spoken to men who tried to study them. . . .”

“You’re fortunate,” muttered Anastasio. “Here in this country they’re as likely to try to drive the Devil out with prayer and cayenne pepper, or call in the local
tlaciuhqui
with his smoke-pot and his mushrooms. There is, of course, every chance that on the second night—the night when
all
the Dead return, young and old alike—poor Prospero will simply decide that his son was murdered by the Jaguar-God or the ghost of Hernán Cortés, and will help Hannibal get out of the country just to spite Capitán Ylario—who is a muddle-headed young prig so enamored of his own abilities that he couldn’t catch an urchin pilfering apples. On the other hand . . .”

Anastasio frowned, and his eyes followed the tall black figure of Don Prospero across the gilded fog of dust in the yard till it vanished beneath the shadows of the stair. “On the other hand, it might be best to get Hannibal out of here before Don Prospero comes back from the cemetery with whatever he thinks his son is going to tell him to do with his killer.”

SEVEN

The pyramids of Mictlán lay east of the
casco,
on high ground above a long extension of the lake that stretched in far too straight a line to be anything but man-made. The most easterly, the Pyramid of the Sun, lay some five miles from the last few fences of the tangle of corrals and sheep-pens that marked the farthest extension of the hacienda’s kitchen precincts. The closest lay at a distance of about three miles, and was the tallest, a hundred and fifty feet of steep-sided brush and heat-withered acacias, studded with the broken edges of stone steps, the bleached faces of stone-carved skulls that stared up startlingly from the pale earth.

That was the Pyramid of the Dead, for which the hacienda was named.

“Tezcatlipoca, now, he never did get on with Quetzalcoatl.” Don Prospero gestured at the broken lumps of brush-covered stone that marked where lesser buildings of the complex had stood. “Seduced three of his nieces, and Xochiquetzal, Tlaloc’s wife, into the bargain, not that it would have taken much, from all I’ve ever heard of Tlaloc. There’s a statue of him over yonder. . . .” He waved in the direction of the reed-curtained lakeshore. “Rain-God. The idiot Greeks would have equated him with Jupiter, but that shows all they know. They’re all flirts, anyhow,” he added darkly. “Women.”

Valentina, riding straight-backed as a little black-clad soldier among the vaqueros who escorted the party, was close enough to hear—Don Prospero seldom spoke below a roar—but didn’t turn her head. Doña Filomena, her pear-shaped and depressed-looking duenna, only clung to the back of the vaquero behind whom she rode pillion and moaned; when Valentina had announced, back in the courtyard, her intention of joining the expedition to the pyramids, her chaperone had blenched and pleaded a headache, but Don Prospero had insisted on the elderly woman’s presence.

He had insisted on Hannibal’s presence, too. January wondered, glancing sidelong at the fiddler riding beside him, whether the Don feared that Ylario was still lurking somewhere and waiting his chance to strike again, or merely wanted to have as large an audience as possible.

“Take Tlazolteotl, now,” the Don went on. “She seduced the holy hermit Jappan for no better reason than that his virtue annoyed her. He ended up having his head cut off—and his wife’s head too, for good measure—and he turned into a scorpion. She turned into a scorpion afterwards as well, a different-colored one. And Maria-Exaltación was no better. Flirted with every man she met, which was astonishing considering she was always down with the vapors or a rash, don’t know how she did it. And Valla, of course, is nothing but a little tart, like that mother of hers, what was her name . . . ? Fernando took it all so seriously. Worst thing I could have done, sending him to Germany, but his mother insisted. . . .”

On Don Prospero’s farther side, Don Rafael de Bujerio clung to the high pommel of his deep Mexican saddle and tried to look as if he weren’t frantic over the effect of the stirrups on the polish of his fine English boots. Having come to Mictlán with no expectation of doing any riding, he had not brought clothes for it. Sweating heavily in his London-tailored tailcoat, he kept grimly at Don Prospero’s side, exclaiming in admiration at everything the old man said.

The other vaqueros strung out in a ragged skein around the Don, his daughter Valentina, and his guests, and observing them, January understood, with sinking heart, just how difficult it would be for Hannibal to make his escape from this place. In their leather breeches, faded shirts, short jackets, and leather
botas—
gaiters—they had a ferocious look, not far removed from the bandits who’d attacked the
diligencia
in the pass: young men for the most part, though there were a couple of stringy graybeards among them, thin and scrubby as the horses they rode. There was an animal quality to them, and they seemed to question Don Prospero no more than the pack-wolves question the king-wolf: those whose hearts harbored questions would simply have moved on. They patrolled the gully-slashed rangeland that lay for dozens of miles in all directions around the
casco,
looking for any sign of anomaly that could mean an injured cow. A man could not ride away from the house without attracting their attention: a man alone on foot would probably not make it to the city at all.

“Xipe Toltec, now, the god of the maize—his priests would put on the flayed skins of their victims and wear them until they rotted off their bodies, to show the people how the husk rots from the corn. You’ll see, there are some astonishing bas-reliefs. . . .”

January urged his horse—a big black gelding—over closer to Hannibal’s, and asked softly, “What became of Franz’s tea-service, by the way? I didn’t see anything like what you described when I was down in the kitchen.”

Hannibal shook his head. “Another of the many things I haven’t liked to ask.” In the strong sunlight his eyes had a bruised look, as if he had not slept in many nights. “Werther kept it in its own chest in Franz’s room—where Werther slept on a trundle-bed in a corner—but now that you speak of it, when they cleared Franz’s things out of the room after Werther departed in haste, I didn’t see it. I can only guess it’s found its way into the Monte de Piedad—the government pawnshop in the city—or the thieves’ market in the southeast corner of the Cathedral square. Did you acquire a rabbit to sample the tea, by the way?”

“Lupe sold me one,” said January. “She said she’d put a mark on its basket so that none of the servants would touch it. I think she suspected I was getting it to sacrifice.”

“As indeed you are.
Dulce et decorum est . . .
”

“Huitzilopochtli, now, the left-handed hummingbird, he was the one they had to fear.” The old Don nudged his mount over closer to January’s, and shook his horsehair quirt at the two friends. “He needed blood—great quantities of it—if the sun was to rise the next day, and I must say it seems to have worked, because the sun rose on schedule and has continued to rise ever since. What they’ll do when the laid-up surplus is spent, I have no notion.” From beneath the wide brim of his glazed leather hat his too-brilliant eyes glared like blue topaz. “They sacrificed dogs as well, you know. Ate them, of course, too. Rather than sacrifice a full-sized and perfectly edible dog, they bred them specially for sacrifice, down to the size of rats. Disgusting little brutes. Isabella has them. God knows why Anastasio lets her keep them. Treats them like babies, talks to them—I daresay if Isabella had babies of her own, she’d get rid of them quick enough. One day I’ll break the neck of that little brute of Valla’s.”

They dismounted in the open space that lay at the foot of the Pyramid of the Dead, close by the remains of two broken statues that had once flanked a stair. Huge eyes and incised feathers decorated the domed head that poked up through the tangle of weeds and earth on one side; on the other, all that remained was a broken mass, and a toothed jaguar grin.

“There’s a crypt cut into the heart of that one,” said Don Prospero, pointing his quirt up at a leveling of the ground three-quarters of the way to the top. “He’s still in there, Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Land of the Dead. They’d tear out the heart before him, and throw the body down the steps to the people who waited here where we stand. Come along, fool,” he added sharply as Don Rafael showed signs of sinking down onto the broken guardian-statue to rest.

The town-bred
hacendado
leaped immediately to his feet and started after Don Prospero, then halted—presumably when he recalled Valentina’s presence—and turned back toward her horse just as Hannibal helped her from the saddle. Don Rafael wavered, as if debating whether he should go back to her and offer her his arm, for the hill was quite steep. But Don Prospero snapped at him again, and he hastened to follow.

“I shall die!” groaned Doña Filomena, almost melting from her perch behind Vasco, the tall chief of the vaqueros. “Oh, I must rest . . . I cannot go on. . . .”

“You’ve only just gotten here,” snapped Don Prospero. “No lagging, now! If you cannot walk, Señora, I assure you I can arrange for you to be dragged.”

She burst into tears and looked to Valentina for sympathy, but Valla only stood looking around her, her arms hugged about her under the short velvet
manga—
the beautifully decorated riding cape—that she wore. With a sniffle Doña Filomena produced a substantial silver flask from her reticule and drank from it, then stumbled after Don Prospero and his daughter.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,”
murmured Hannibal, pausing to contemplate the staring eye of the Serpent-God at the foot of the pyramid.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
He produced a flask of his own—laudanum-laced sherry—and set off in Prospero’s wake, January walking thoughtfully behind.

“Mostly the Spanish destroyed everything they found here,” declaimed Prospero as he led the way straight up the steep, brushy slope. “There used to be little temples on the tops of all of these—you’ll see.” His blithe harsh voice chopped at the hush of the forenoon. From somewhere in the dry tangle of creosote bush and yellowing weeds near-by came the rattle of an insect, the skitter of a fleeing hare or fox.
Sopilotes
circled, tiny as imaginary specks in the vision, deep in the well of the sky. Under the white glare of the sun, the pyramids loomed eerily, fragments of carving peering from among the rough-barked junipers. On one section of frieze, twisted human torsos cut into the stone in deep relief, detached arms and writhing, severed legs. Above each carved body was a carved head, curls of what looked like ribbon extruding from their half-parted lips.

“Breath,” explained Hannibal, panting in the thin air as he climbed. “Or the songs that they sing in dying.

All whom war, death, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain. . . .”

From the level space they had seen from below, a black cave opened into the heart of the pyramid. “The Inquisitors came here, of course.” Don Prospero strolled casually into the low tunnel that stretched into darkness; looking back down the precipitate slope, January saw the vaqueros clustered close around the horses, looking nervously over their shoulders.

Their rifles were in their hands, not at their shoulders. It was not El Moro and his bandits that they feared.

“’Stasio and I explored every foot of these shrines when we were boys, searching for treasure.” Yellow light flared in the darkness as Don Prospero kindled a torch. “I laugh now to think that two youths expected to uncover a treasure that would have escaped so expert a looter as Cortés.”

January ducked as he entered the passageway, the crumbling corbels brushing the crown of his wide-brimmed hat. Ahead, the torch-light revealed more dead men carved on the brown stone of the walls, dismembered, beheaded, decapitated heads singing or breathing out their final curling ribbons of life between rows of grinning skulls. Then he stepped into the main crypt and froze. Years of rational study among the educated of Paris deserted him in one single chilling breath as he came face-to-face with the Lord of the Land of the Dead.

Mictlantecuhtli, skeletal, crouching, grinning with the bones of his face, fleshless hands folded before the empty cavity of his belly. The horrid shape was cut into the far wall in such deep relief as to seem like almost a statue, the torch-gleam lost utterly in the twin black pits of his eyes. Parted teeth showed only a black eternal hollow. The floor of the little chamber rose at that side of the room, a broken rim showing where steps had been. At the foot of those crumbled steps, empty as the god’s shadowed eyes, a circular pit gaped, filled with bottomless shadow. Between pit-rim and outer door stood what had to have been the altar-stone, its carvings all broken, weeds growing in the crevices of its death’s-head designs.

“Earth’s face is but thy table,”
said Hannibal, sinking wearily down onto the altar and taking another sip of sherry,
“there are set / Plants, cattle, men, dishes for Death to eat.”

“We nearly broke our necks going down that cenote on a rope.” Don Prospero nodded at the black maw of the holy well. “Of course, the Spanish filled it in with rubble, centuries ago. The Indians said that Tlaloc, god of the pulp of the earth, dwelled in its depths; they’d throw virgin girls down, and gold and jewels and balls of copal incense. Me, if I’d been a priest here, you can be sure I’d have had a net stretched on the days when they were just throwing gold and jewels. Tlaloc could have the girls, for all of me. Eh, daughter?”

He glanced wickedly at Valla, who stood beside the narrow entry of the passageway, Don Rafael fidgeting uncomfortably at her side.

“My father was always forbidding us to come here because he said bandits lurked in the ruins,” Don Prospero continued. “I never believed him, and we never encountered any, nor even saw signs of their camps. Come on. Don’t lag. You have to see the countryside from the top.

“Banditry is ten times now what it was—twenty times—since we kicked the Penínsularios out,” he went on as he charged up the remaining slope of the pyramid like a billygoat. “And still they won’t come here. Sometimes I ride out here alone, to watch the moon rise from the top of the pyramid, or to bring my telescope and study the stars. And in the hours before the moon rises . . . Sometimes I’ll just lie by the lip of the well and listen. And I’ll hear old Tlaloc’s voice speaking to me out of the dark.”