Read Online Feathered Serpent by Colin Falconer - Free Book Online Page B

night since to bring you news.”
    “Well?”
    “They do not have the elegant speech, they speak some other language that sounds like the quacking of ducks. They have a woman who speaks for them: a Person, like ourselves. She calls herself Malinali.”
    “And what did this Malinali say to you?”
    Tendile was trembling. Saliva leaked from his mouth onto the floor.
    “What did she say?” Motecuhzoma shouted.
    “She said that the ancient prophecies are to be fulfilled. She said ... that Feathered Serpent has returned as promised.”
    Motecuhzoma pressed his knuckles to his forehead, as if trying to burrow his way inside his own skull. “Who was this woman?”
    “I confess I do not know my Lord, except that she spoke most insolently to me.”
    “What did she say?”
    “That Feathered Serpent wishes to speak with you in person, that he has been commanded to do this by Olintecle himself.”
    Tendile lay prostrate on the cold marble, waiting a hundred years for these few terrible moments to pass. I will be sacrificed to Hummingbird for this, he thought. My skin will be flayed and thrown into the great pit at Yopico.
    Motecuhzoma took an agave thorn from the shrine and stabbed at his own flesh, repeatedly, until the blood ran down his arms. “Did you see this stranger who claimed to be Quetzalcóatl?”
    “Yes, my lord. His skin was white, like chalk, and he had a dark beard and a straight nose. He was dressed in black and wore a green feather in his cap.”
    “A quetzal plume!” Motecuhzoma murmured. A god was known best by his head dress. A jade feather signified Feathered Serpent. And black was one of his colours. “What of the others who were with him?”
    “Like him, they wore strange clothes that had a pestilential odour about them. Many of them had long beards and hair of strange and unnatural colours. Their swords and shields and bows are all made of some metal that shines like the sun. And yet, great Lord, if they were indeed gods, their excrement was not of gold, as it should be, but like ours. For we waited after our meeting to observe them and ...”
    “What do you know of the ways of the gods!” Motecuhzoma shouted.
    Tendile lay on his belly, silent. Please do not kill me.
    “Did this woman tell you why this bearded lord wishes to speak with me?”
    “She says it concerns matters of the gods.”
    “They spoke of religion?”
    “No, but I saw them at their ritual, great Lord. They were drinking blood.”
    For the first time Motecuhzoma allowed himself to hope.
    But then Tendile said: “Yet it was not the blood of a man they were drinking, or this is what she said, but the blood of a god.”
    “The blood of a god?”
    “My artists drew pictures for you, great lord.”
    One of Tendile’s scribes crawled forward clutching several bark sheets, the paintings that he and his companion had made on the beach at San Juan de Ulúa. Motecuhzoma snatched them from him. He stared at the floating temples with their great banners of cloth, the logs spitting fire, the two-headed monsters, the angry beasts that followed them.
    “What is this?”
    “Great Lord, the strangers possess stone serpents that shoot smoke and sparks from their mouths. If the serpent is pointed towards a tree, the tree falls. If it is pointed towards a mountain, the mountain cracks and crumbles away. The noise is like thunder and the smoke has a vile smell that made us all sick. Some of them rode great stags, taller than two men standing on each other’s shoulders, and these beasts carry them wherever they want to go. They breathe smoke from their mouths and when they ran it was as if the very ground trembled under our feet. They also possess dogs as no dogs we have ever seen, monsters straight from the land of the dead, with great jowls and yellow teeth.”
    What this woman called Malinali had told Tendile could not be denied. It was the year One Reed, the day Feathered Serpent had been born and the day he had sailed away. The portents