Clash of Star-Kings (7 page)

That was what was outside the fiery circle.

Inside, was something else altogether.

The darkness of night, the slant and diluted rays of moonlight, the flickering-flaring-spurting-blazing-dazzling-dying of the firelight: none of this was designed to help give any clear picture of what was there … and the exertion of climbing in the rarified air now tended to obscure their vision from within their eyes…. There was a first impression of flashing colors and of odd, misshapen design — as though great grotesque birds had been dressed up by a gifted, but insane, child and set to hopping about in agony upon a great, hot griddle — but, of course, there was no fire within the circle of fire, as there is said to be no wind within the eye of a hurricane. The things moved and jerked about and flashed with gold and brilliant plumes and iridescent ornaments, great grotesque and asymmetrical bifurcated and trifurcated blunted muzzles out-thrust and huge eyes glaring like gigantic burning coals —

“Oh, I don’t like this,” Sarah whispered.

He said, “Sh….”

The things within the circle took up the chant in deep and discordant voices distorted by their masks and danced and jerked and moved about. The coyote skins flapped, naked human flesh gleaming as though oiled. Only the smoke of the wood fires, mixing in with the mist, seemed normal or natural. And then smoke and mist closed in once more and the sound fell low once more.

Jacob muttered, “Let’s go — ”

“Evans — ”

“Let’s
go!
”

She obeyed, yielded to his commanding arm. He could hear her subdued weeping.

Afterwards, he said, “Look, I know that you’re worried about the kittykat, but that was no time and no place to break in and say,
Dispenseme, yo busco mi bicho-gato….
”

“I know,” she said, with a snuffle.

“Boy! Are the natives ever restless tonight!”

They didn’t say anything more for a very long time, and by the time they came again to the tottering old archway it was already daylight, though still misty, And here they paused. That is to say, Sarah stopped, and as she had been using Jacob as a sort of staff or crutch, he perforce stopped, too. “Whats-matter?” he grunted.

“So are we going home now?” she asked, in a pity-me-for-surely-you-can-suggest-a-better-notion tone of voice.

“Not necessarily…. We can go to the Los Remedios-Hilton, if you prefer? What kind of a question is that? Where else would we go?”

In a teeny-tiny voice she said, “I thought we might go to Mac’s house….”

“At this hour?” But a look at her woebegone and teary face stopped his sarcasm. “Well … he did invite us for breakfast … but even for breakfast it’s darned early. What say we go home awhile and rest up? —
then
we can go to Mac’s house. Okay?”

But she, in a voice which was almost inaudible, said that she didn’t want to go home … because it was full of dirty dishes at home … And so he, knowing that her stubbornness was often in inverse proportion to the reasonableness of her request, and that if balked she was perfectly capable of simply sitting down under the archway until she took root, he said, “Let’s go to Mac’s….”

Fortunately, the menage at Mac’s also included an aged aunt who retired and rose with the poultry; Tía Epifania had just returned from the
molina de nixtamal
with fresh-ground lime-boiled cornmeal for the breakfast tortillas, and greeted them as though it was the most natural thing in the world for anybody to be up and around at that hour. “Pass, Yourselves!” she cried, cheerily. “This is Your House!”

Some question as to the house’s ownership evidently troubled her niece, however, from behind whose bedroom door a sleepy and puzzled
“
¿
Quien?”
proceeded.

“Los paisanos de Roberto,”
shrilled the ancient, and blew on an ember. The niece-landlady, after an astonished invocation to the Virgin of Guadalupe (whom she addressed, companionably, as “Sweety!”), dug Roberto in the ribs with an audible thud. He broke off in mid-snore, and presently appeared, rather rumpled and sleepy-looking, but as amiable as usual. He looked at Sarah’s face and blinked.

“Let me perform some quick hydraulics,” he said, “and I’ll be at your entire disposal.” He did and was. Then, tapped and drained and washed and combed, he sat down and lit a brown-paper cigarette and began to talk of some light and humorous matter until he thought that they were sufficiently relaxed for him to ask if anything was the matter.

Jacob hesitated. “Well … we had a rather curious experience last night. Or, early this morning, to be more exact … maybe … I’m not sure of the exact time.” And he proceeded, with help from Sarah, to tell what had happened. The account took a while; Mac nodded and nodded, lighting a second Negrita from the first before they were finished.

Then he laughed. “Well, if there were such a thing as a local chamber of commerce, they’d have printed leaflets which I’m sure would have taken a load off your mind … if you’d read them in advance.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Simply that it’s customary to dress up in costume at this time of year. The hills around here have got more old customs and costumes and dances and fiestas and fieras of one sort and another than just about any area of comparable size in the country. You just happened to stumble across one of them without realizing it, that’s all.”

Jacob, though somewhat relieved, was still somewhat dubious. “Dress up like the old Aztec gods, too, you mean?”

Macauley shrugged again and smiled again. “Well, I hadn’t heard of that particular one. Or of the coyote skin one, either. But, Lord! I don’t know all of them, there are so many. About the only one which is well-publicized is the one that’s attached to the Holy Hermit … and that one, of course, even though it’s technically theologically irregular, well, still, it
is
attached to the church. But most of these others are purely pagan. Which is to say that for the whole length of time of the Spanish rule, they were at least in theory illegal. And hence tended to be clandestine. Then when the Roman Catholic Church was disestablished and some measure, some varying measure of governmental anti-religious pressure came along, varying from disapproval and ridicule down to outright persecution — why, a lot of the pagan cults and ceremonies got it in the neck, too. It didn’t make much difference to them if they were suppressed in the name of Catholicism or of Freemasonry — which reminds me” — he chuckled — “no, I’ll mention that later. Anyway, so they went right on being underground, so to say.

“Nowadays very few of them have got anything to fear, actually, from the law. But, well, these things are looked upon as silly things which only ignorant Indians engage in. And even ignorant Indians don’t want to be laughed at, mocked. So they go right on going off into the woods, you see. Sometimes whole families sort of split up over it. Say that one family has a son in the secondary school, well, they know he’s bound to be too modern to strip down to a loincloth and dance around, say, a post with homemade hootchemacallits pinned onto it. So the afternoon before the thing is due his father may slip him a few pesos and say, ‘Why don’t you go visit your cousin in Amecameca — tell him we’d like to come, but we can’t get away.’ Then, with the kid out of the way, they can troop out to the boondocks and carry on the way Grandpa used to do.

“That’s all there is to it, really….”

Jacob was weakening, but was still not convinced. “This wasn’t any mere poor-Injun bare-assing around,” he said. “Why, those costumes must have cost a fortune! Besides … besides … I don’t know just how to put it without sounding corny and pulp-fictionary — but — well, damn it! Yes! There was an atmosphere of evil about whatever was going on back up there last night! I had the definite feeling that if I’d let on that I was there I might have wound up a patient in what you called the Aztec Cardiectomy Clinic! Really, Mac, no kidding around: that was very bad medicine there.”

He was about to enlarge on it, seeing that Macauley was at last becoming at least a little bit impressed that this was no mere rustic frolic — but then Lenita appeared. She had so thoroughly repented of her earlier brusqueness that she clearly neither remembered it nor desired it to be remembered — a plump, dark woman of general good nature and not a single word of English. She bustled Sarah away from the two men with an oh-you-poor-thing manner, reclaiming her for the Improved Benevolent Order of Women — local branch consisting of Lenita, Aunt Epifania, and now, of course, Sarah — and impressed her into service at the business corner of the kitcheii. Sarah, as soon as she saw that (a) she was not merely allowed, but encouraged, to take samples of the sundry goodies, and (b) that there were no dirty dishes to be washed, no, not a one, Sarah abandoned the discussion without a pang. She even fell spontaneously into Spanish. “What quality of article will we you were to have making thereunto?” she inquired cheerfully.

Macauley’s smile slipped a bit, with her gone. In a lower voice, he said, “Well, there may have been some intended bad medicine brewing around here. Some of the aborigines are really upset, you know.”

“Yes, that I gather. But
why?
”

“Government doings.”

“Meaning …?”

“Meaning: Tlaloc.”

The familiar-unfamiliar word made Jacob frown. Then he remembered. “Tlaloc. Wasn’t he the old Mexican rain god?” More than this, the name conveyed nothing to him, because he had been in his studio trying to finish an assignment the while that Rob Macauley had been telling Sarah all about the image in the cave (and/or tunnel) under the Sacred Mountain. But Macauley didn’t mind, and he gave his account all over again. Jacob was impressed.

“Sounds as nice as what we saw last night was nasty…. But how are they connected?”

Over the cheerful clatter of mixing bowls Mac said, “I don’t know for sure that they are connected. I just think that they may be. Have you seen the cavalry troop in town? No? Guess you must not have been out of the house yesterday at all, then. Well, it seems to be a fact that the government has decided to remove the Tlaloc to the big new Museum of … what’s the whole handle? … mmm … The Museum of National Antiquities and Patrimonial Treasures (how’s that for grandiloquence? — not that they haven’t got a lot to be grandiloquent about!) … yes…. Down in ‘Mexico.’ So the cavalry is sort of here as advance guard to stake out the scene until the moving men arrive.

“The C.O. is a figure in the classical style, tall and leathery and trim mustache, you know. Colonel Benito Alvarez Diaz, and mind your manners, too. I didn’t know why they were here, and I said to him, jovially — why not? — ‘Ah,
coronel
, are you here for the feria?’ Wow! Hey? Guess what hit the fan? I got a fierce little, quick little, stiff little lecture on the fact that the United Mexican States constitute a secular republic. Emphasis:
secular
. And that, in addition, he,
Coronel
Benito Alvarez Diaz, is an educated man and a freemason and — I’m quoting — and that as educated man and a freemason he does not fear and indeed, defies all superstition, whether Christian or pagan! Hey?”

“Well may you say, ‘Hey.’”

Macauley said more. He said that he thought that the army unit was there to give notice that the government intended to stand for no nonsense, either from good churchmen lay or religious who might not like any poking around in the Monte Sagrado, or from good (or, as the case might be) bad pagans who might and probably would in one way or another object to the removal of a Tlaloc which had been there, so to speak, forever.

“But it won’t do them any good. Lopez Matteos wants it down there in ‘Mexico’ where the tourists can see it and the antiquarians study it, and you can bet your ass that’s where it’s going to go. To wit, Mexico. And the poor dumb bastards in the boondocks can dance all they want to and complain that if it’s moved there won’t be any rain again…. It won’t do them a bit of good. I just hope,” he added, “that those poor dumbos, some of whom, mind you, are my (ha ha) best friends, don’t engage in any transference of hostilities….” His manner was thoughtful.

“What do you mean?”

A shrug. “Oh…. Anybody who isn’t from right around here is a foreigner. You’re a foreigner, President Lopez Matteos is a foreigner, every savant or non-savant who’s ever come here to look at Tlaloc is a foreigner, and, of course, needless to say that Colonel Diaz who’s here to start taking away precious potent sacred rainiferous Tlaloc is a foreigner. In other words, to a mind very untutored, which is most minds, all foreigners are linked together in an evil intent — hey? — and design. So — ”

“A la mesa, a la mesa, hombre,”
Lenita directed. “Here are tortillas and refried beans for those who eat the Lord God’s food, here is
dulce
of quince and fresh honey, coffee cooked in the aluminum
maquinita
, pure butter of cows, and here is also — look, look — ¡
que linda!
— los pancakes norteamericanos which Roberto has so successfully taught me how to make — ”

Sarah, beaming, licking her fingers, said to Jacob, “Isn’t it
good?
Doesn’t it smell yummy? What is she saying, the tootsie?”

Jacob held out his cup for coffee and his plate for pancakes. “She’s quoting from the Popol Vuh. It means, ‘Eat, eat; later we’ll talk.’”

Later, however, they were too full to talk. And it was even later that they finally and leisurely returned home, full and contented and quite at ease, entering through the same back door to the back patio they had left by, and found Evans lying on their doorstep, stiff and bloody and with his heart torn out and missing.

The front and back patios alike contained a profusion of flowers and fruit and nut trees (there was also an adobe chicken coop, the inhabitants of which tended to vanish away on the eves of feast days), but there was also a multitude of such herbs as lent themselves to domestic cultivation; and these Señora Josefa picked and dried and sometimes distilled, as part of her craft and trade. She gave away as much as she sold and had a fair-sized following among the poor, who referred to her as
la doctora;
often as not there were several of them sitting on the bench in the front patio waiting for advice and supply, neither of which would cost them a
centavo
.