BeneathCeaselessSkies Issue008 Read online

  Issue #8 • Jan. 15, 2009

  “Beneath the Mask,” by Aliette de Bodard

  “Winterblood,” by Megan Arkenberg

  PODCAST STORY

  “Precious Meat,” by Catherine S Perdue

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  Beneath the Mask

  Aliette de Bodard

  “He’s in here,” Huchimitl said.

  I stood in the courtyard of her opulent house, amidst pine and palm trees, breathing in the smell of dust and fallen pine needles. Just outside, a few paces from me, was Coyocan, one of the busiest suburbs of Tenochtitlan; but the bustle from the crowded streets and canals was barely audible, cut off by the walls of the courtyard. Around us were several doorways, closed by coloured entrance-curtains; and it was before one of those that Huchimitl and I stood.

  Not for the first time, I wished Huchimitl wasn’t wearing that accursed ceramic mask—so I could read her face. Or, failing that, that she’d at least tell me why she was wearing it. The only people in the city I’d seen wearing that kind of mask were disfigured warriors. But I’d asked the question twice on my way there, and been met with silence.

  “I’m not sure I can do anything—” I started, but Huchimitl cut me off.

  “Please, Acatl. Just take a look at the man. And tell me whether he’s cursed.”

  Curses, unless they were from the underworld, weren’t really my province. If I’d had any sense, I’d have refused Huchimitl when she’d arrived in my temple.

  But she’d been wearing that mask, hiding her face from me. Surely....

  Surely the girl I remembered from my childhood, the one who’d turned the heads of all the boys in our calpulli clan—including mine—couldn’t possibly be injured?

  I couldn’t bring myself to believe that. There had to be some other explanation for that mask. And I had to know what it was.

  Huchimitl was still standing before the door, waiting for my answer. “Acatl,” she said, shaking her head in that disturbingly familiar fashion, halfway between exasperation and amusement.

  My heart twisted in my chest. In truth, I’d never had been able to refuse her, and even though it had been years since we’d last seen each other, it still did not change anything. “I can’t promise you much,” I said, finally.

  Huchimitl shook her head—sunlight played on her mask as she did so, creating disturbing reflections on the ceramic, like a breath from Mictlan, the underworld. I fought an urge to walk up to her and tear off the mask. “Acatl, please.”

  Gently, I drew aside the hanging mat that closed the door, trying not to disturb the bells sewn into it. I paused halfway through, stared at Huchimitl. She stood unmoving, the mask drinking in the sunlight.

  “I’ll wait for you in the reception area,” she said.

  I sighed and entered the room.

  Its walls bore frescoes of Patecatl, God of Medicine, holding a drinking cup and an incense brazier, and of Quetzalcoatl, God of Creation and Knowledge, who stood with the bones of the dead in His outstretched hands. A strong smell of herbs rose from the back of the room, where the sick man lay on a reed mat. His legs were curled in an unnatural position.

  He did not move as I came in, save that his eyes opened and stared straight at me. It was the gaze of a strong, shrewd man.

  Citli, Huchimitl had called him. A warrior captured by her son on the battlefield: a strong, healthy sacrifice who would be offered on the altar, for the glory of the gods—and for that of his captor.

  That was the way it should have worked. Someone, obviously, had had a different idea.

  “A priest. So she’s brought you into this, too?” Citli’s voice was reedy and thin, on the verge of breaking with every word. But still, the humour came through, a sign that whatever had affected his body had not yet reached his mind.

  “I am Acatl, priest for the Dead,” I told him.

  Citli made a thin, rasping sound, which I realised was laughter. “I’m not yet dead, priest. Save your rituals for those who need them.” He fell silent for a while, and then said, “I am Citli, warrior of Mixteca.”

  I nodded, acknowledging the introduction. I had already gotten a good look at him, and what I had been half-expecting—the green aura that was the mark of the underworld—was not there. But there was something—a shimmering in the air, a hint of a coiled, alien power around him—something that did not belong. Huchimitl had been correct: he was cursed.

  Citli was staring at me. “You’re not like the other priests.”

  “You’ve seen many priests in Coyoacan?” I asked, moving away from the reed mat and searching the room, overturning wicker chests and ceramic pots.

  He laughed again. “Priests are the same everywhere. But you—you don’t have dried blood in your hair, or thorns in your earlobes.”

  I shrugged. “I had them, once. But now I only perform sacrifices for the Dead.” My search of the small room had revealed nothing useful. My only recourse lay in speaking to Citli, and hoping he would know something of importance. “How long have you been sick?”

  The humour left his eyes. “Thirteen days. A full week. Why does a priest that sacrifices to the Dead worry about that? They told me I would be healed in time for the ceremony.” There was fear in his voice, now. I knew why: if he did not die a warrior’s death on the altar, he would not go to the Sun God’s Heaven with his peers, but be condemned to the ignominious underworld.

  “I’m not here for the last rites,” I said. “Huchimitl thought perhaps I could determine was wrong with you. Do you have any idea of what’s ailing you?”

  His voice was sullen. “No. All I know is that I want to be healthy for the ceremony. I won’t be cheated of my glory.”

  “You don’t know why? Huchimitl says her son is not popular among the warriors—” She hadn’t said much in truth, just hinted that Mazahuatl might have made some powerful enemies. And I’d been too busy worrying about the mask to ask the proper questions.

  A mistake. How could I help her, if I couldn’t control my own feelings?

  Citli’s upper body moved slightly, in what appeared to be an attempt to shrug. “Her son Mazahuatl is young and arrogant, and an upstart. But he is my beloved war-father, the one who captured me on the battlefield, and he will make me ascend to the Sun’s Heaven. The rest shouldn’t concern me.”

  “Shouldn’t it? If Mazahuatl has enemies, they’ll want to strike at you as well,” I said. “They might have cursed you, just to make him look like a fool.”

  “Making his beloved war-son unable to walk to his sacrifice?” Citli’s voice was bitter. “They’re cowards, all of them.”

  “I know. But until we know who they are, they can’t be punished.” I paused, then asked, “When did you first notice something was wrong?”

  “It started with my legs. Now I have no feeling anywhere in my body, only above my neck.”

  I was no healer; his affliction, if it had no magical cause, would truly be beyond me.

  “And you have no idea why?” I asked.

  He shook his head, forcefully. “No. Look. I wasn’t here a month ago. Whatever is going on, I have no part in it.”

  I could see that; clearly he was not lying, and equally clearly he didn’t know anything.

  Which wouldn’t get me, or Huchimitl, anywhere.

  Curses.

  “Do you have people who take care of you?” I asked.

  Citli looked at me, almost offended. “Of course,” he said. “Mazahuatl knows the proper care for a prisoner.”

  Warriors. Always quick to take offence. It would have been amusing, had the situation not been so serious. “And they noticed nothing?”


  Citli shook his head. “You might ask them,” he said. “There’s an old woman named Xoco. She brings food, and gossip, and whatever I cannot get, lying here.” He was angry again—for a young, energetic man, falling ill and being confined to a bed must have been the worst of fates.

  I finished my examination of him, which didn’t yield anything more. He was indeed paralysed; and the curse seemed to spread as time passed. But I couldn’t determine its cause—nor reassure myself that whatever had struck Citli down wouldn’t strike again within the house.

  I took my leave of him, with no answers, just a growing feeling of unease in my belly.

  What was going on? What was Huchimitl embroiled in?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Finding Xoco wasn’t hard: I asked the slave at the gates, and he pointed me to the other end of the courtyard—to a door closed with a simple, unadorned cactus-fibre curtain. In front of that door, an old woman was kneeling, grinding maize in a metate pestle.

  Xoco looked up when I arrived; her eyes widened. “My Lord....”

  I cut her off. “I’m just here for a few questions. Citli thought you might know something.”

  “Lord Citli?” Xoco nodded. “About his illness?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m not sure I can help,” Xoco said, with a slight grimace. She laid aside her mortar, and rose, keeping her gaze to the ground. “It was sudden, that thing. One morning he couldn’t rise anymore.”

  “You didn’t notice anything?” I had a feeling I was just duplicating my conversation with Citli—running around in circles.

  “No. I’m just a slave woman, my Lord. I can’t see magic, or converse with the gods, as you do.” Xoco’s voice radiated the awe most common folks had for priests—something which wasn’t going to facilitate my task.

  I sighed. I’d learn nothing new here; I might as well go back to Huchimitl and question her further.

  But then I remembered the mask. “Have you been here long?”

  “In this household? Five years or so. I was a gift, for the master’s marriage.”

  “You know them well, then. The master and mistress of the house,” I said, and bit my lip. It had nothing to do with the investigation, and it was a prying, improper question to ask. But I couldn’t get that mask out of my head. “When did Huchimitl start wearing that mask?”

  Xoco was silent, for a while, and then she said, “It started four years ago. When they found Master Tlalli dead in his room.” Her voice was a whisper now, and she kept her head bowed to the ground, making her expression unreadable. “He was a generous man, but she only married him for his prestige.”

  I wished I could have denied the accusation. But I remembered the morning Huchimitl had told me she was marrying Tlalli—just after I’d come back from the calmecac school, bursting with joy at the idea of sharing my experiences with her. I hadn’t expected her to be angry. I hadn’t expected her to fling her future husband’s feats of glory in my face, or to mock me for choosing the priesthood.

  But she had been a little too proud of his prowess—a little too forceful. Later, when I had cooled down enough to think, I remembered how she used to come to me, always standing a little too close for propriety—and the day when she’d danced for the Emergence of Flowers in her white cotton shift, swaying to the rhythm of drums, fierce and beautiful, unmatched by any of the other dancers. It was you, she’d said, when I congratulated her. I only did it because you were here.

  How could have I have been so blind?

  Her marriage.... Why should it have been happy, if she’d contracted it out of disappointment, out of spite?

  “They fought all the time,” Xoco was saying. “She’d always reproach him, always nag him for not being good enough, brave enough. There’d be bruises on both of them, come morning. On his arms, on her face. Except that night, it went worse than usual. Something happened. Something—”

  Her fear was palpable—radiating from her to settle in the growing hollow in my stomach.

  “I don’t know what exactly, my Lord. I wasn’t there. All I know is that they found him dead, and she shut herself in her rooms and wouldn’t let anyone close to her. Afterwards, she started wearing the mask, and never took it off—they say it was to hide what he’d done to her.”

  The hollow in my stomach would not go away. For years I had told myself that Huchimitl had found happiness with her husband, that if I came to her house I would only intrude on her.

  Lies, all of it. Useless lies.

  They’d fought. Every night, perhaps. They’d hit each other, and left traces—bruises.

  But it wasn’t only a few bruises Tlalli had given her, was it, if Huchimitl was still wearing that mask?

  “So the master is dead.”

  Xoco looked at me, and her eyes shimmered in the sunlight. “Yes. Gone down into Mictlan with the other shades, and not coming back.”

  “I see,” I said.

  She shook her head, as if finally remembering to whom she’d told her tale. “I wasn’t there. I couldn’t do anything. But—” Her face twisted again, halfway between fear and hatred. “But I know one thing. They said Master Tlalli died of a weak heart, but I don’t believe that.”

  “The physicians ascertained that,” I said, quietly, not liking what she was telling me.

  Xoco looked down again. “She never loved him. Not truly. And there are poisons....”

  This time I cut her off before she could voice the hateful words. “Yes,” I said. “I understand. Thank you.” Xoco was sincere; and that was the worst. She really believed that Huchimitl had killed her own husband.

  But that was impossible. Huchimitl would never do such a thing.

  The girl I remembered, no. But the woman she had become—the woman I had scorned in my blindness?

  Xoco waited until my back was to her to speak again. “The house hasn’t been right since, my lord. Never. The mistress will say what she wants, but it’s never been right since Master Tlalli died.”

  “It’s empty,” I said, turning back to her. “Without a master. That’s all.”

  She shook her head again. “No. I’ve been in empty houses. This one isn’t empty. There’s something in it. Something that will suck the soul out of you. Be careful, my Lord.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Xoco had unsettled me more than I had thought possible. To calm myself, I walked through the courtyard.

  Huchimitl hadn’t loved her husband. They’d quarrelled, often and bitterly: a loveless, angry marriage. Xoco had been right in that respect at least.

  After that fateful morning, I’d never spoken to Huchimitl again. Something had broken between us. Her betrothed was a tequiua, a warrior who had taken four prisoners and was entitled to tribute and honours—I remembered Huchimitl’s angry gaze when she’d flung his feats of glory at me. Only later did I understand that it had not been anger, but unrequited love, that had made her so forceful. By then, it was too late. My meagre gifts of apology were returned intact; when I came to her father’s house, her family would not speak to me, and Huchimitl herself was never there.

  Would things have been different, I wondered, if I had understood her that morning? For years I had told myself that it would have made no difference—that it was the gods that I wanted to serve, that Huchimitl did not matter. But I knew she did.

  I looked at the house again. Why had Xoco been so frightened of it?

  It was a normal house for an affluent warrior: a courtyard enclosed by adobe buildings, with a few pine trees and a pool in the centre. The entrance-curtains to each building were elaborately decorated, but the walls themselves were not painted: odd but not sinister. It was, to be sure, a bit unsettling to see adobe stark white, shining under the sun as if it held some secret light, but—

  My eyes had started to water, and there was a throbbing in my head that had not been there before, a throbbing like some secret heartbeat uniting the earth beneath my feet and the buildings scattered on its surface. And then I rea
lised that the throbbing was the beat of my own heart, rising faster and faster within my chest, singing like pain in my whole body, sending waves of heat until my skin was utterly consumed, and everything beneath it was revealed, blistered and smarting....

  No. I tore my eyes from the house as fast as I could, but it took a while for my heartbeat to calm down. I had seen enough strange things in my life to know this was not a hallucination. Xoco was right. There was something about this house. Something unpleasant, and it was spreading—from the house to Citli, and the gods only knew where it was going to stop.

  I didn’t like it. It meant that everyone could be struck down.

  Everyone.

  After that experience, I was not keen on entering a room in the house again, but Huchimitl was waiting for me inside—and I would not leave her alone in there, if I could help it. I asked the slave at the gates where the reception area was, and he showed me through another door into a large, well-lit room.

  The brightly-coloured frescoes adorning the room were a relief after the blank adobe of the outer walls. All of them represented sacrifices to the gods: young children weeping as their throats were slit to honour Tlaloc, God of Rain; a maiden dancing to honour Xilonen, Goddess of Young Corn, later replaced by a priest wearing her flayed, yellow skin; a warrior, his face thrust into burning embers as a sacrifice to Huehueteotl, God of the Hearth.

  Again, those were not unusual. I well knew that only human blood and human lives kept the end of the world at bay. I had abased myself before gods, offered them what they needed, from human hearts to flayed skins; I had wielded many obsidian knives myself in many sacrifices. But the concentration of images in that room seemed almost unhealthy.

  I found Huchimitl sitting on the dais in the centre. She turned her masked face towards me. “So?”

  “Something is wrong.” I looked at her, sitting secure between her walls, never suspecting about the curse affecting more than just Citli. “The house is wrong.”