Strange City Read online

  I do not know how long we lay together, locked in that predatory embrace. His blood was youthful; it spurted; it permeated my pores; I drank it and I breathed it into my lungs; for a fleeting moment it brought back to mind those nights of furtive, unful­filled encounters in the chill desert night; the burning curve of a young girl's thigh, the aroma of her flowing pubes. Those were the times before the god called me, when I was mortal and barely man.

  At length I realized that I had completely drained him. I let go and he thudded on the polished floor like a terra-cotta doll. It was then that I became aware of a noisome clanging sound, a whirling, flashing red light, and men in strange blue clothing who brandished muskets of a sleekly futuristic design as they surrounded the plinth on which I lay. The boy who had fled stood be­neath an archway, babbling and shivering and pointing at me and at his friend's desiccated corpse.

  Perhaps, I decided, it would be more prudent to play dead for a little while longer.

  I awakened in another chamber. It was lined with leatherbound codices of the kind the black robes favored. The room was lit by candlelight, and I sitting on a wooden chair. I tried to move, but I had been bound with ropes—metal ropes, artfully strung, and padlocked, the way the Spaniards keep their gold. Across an immense desk, cluttered with the artifacts of my people, jeweled skulls and jade statuettes and blood-cups, sat a woman.

  She was of man-beast extraction, but not unattrac­tive. I had never seen a woman of their kind before; they had brought none with them from their country, which was perhaps why they had become so fero­cious. She was sharp-nosed, and had long brown hair. When she spoke to me, it was, to my amazement, in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica people.

  "I'm Julia Epstein," she said. "I'm the curator of our Latin American collection. Would you care for a little blood?"

  "I'm quite full, thank you," I said.

  "In that case, you might want to start telling me what the hell is going on. It's not every day that a museum exhibit gets up and starts attacking the pub­lic. Who are you?"

  "It's not proper for me to give my name to you, a man-beast."

  She laughed. "Man-beast! I know you Aztecs used to think that the Spaniards and their horses were some kind of hybrid monster, but times have changed. We drive automobiles now. I think it's safe for you to tell me your name. I'm not going to acquire any mystical power over you. Besides, you're just going to have to trust me; I'm the one who talked the cops into believing that that punk's story was just some kind of acid-trip fantasy; they have him under wraps now, the poor child, deciding whether to get him on murder one."

  "Very well," I said, "I am Nezahualcoyotl."

  "And I'm Santa Claus," said Julia Epstein, frowning.

  "So you say you're the Nezahualcoyotl, who claimed descent from the great gods of Teotihuacan, the great­est poet, musician, and prophet of the Aztecs, their first great ruler, a man who was an ancient memory when Moctezuma was king and the Conquistadores swept over Mexico?"

  "You are well informed," I said.

  "Well, why not? It's no harder to believe that than to believe that an exceptionally well-preserved mummy, just dug up from the newly discovered cata­combs in Mexico City, and my museum's prize exhibit, would get up, walk around, attack a few punks, and drink their blood. And to think that I dug you up with my own hands."

  "So it is to you that owe my continued existence."

  "If you want to call it living."

  "What else would you call it?"

  "You're a vampire."

  "I'm unfamiliar with that word."

  "Oh, don't give me that bullshit, Nezzy. I know every­thing about you guys. I can't get anyone to believe me, but I've gathered a shitload of information. Yeah, I'm an archaeologist, sure, but vampires are kind of a hobby with me, know what I mean? And this city's crawling with them. I know. I've got tons of evidence: clippings, photographs, police files. Tried to sell this shit to the Enquirer, and you know what? They rejected it. Said it wasn't, ah, convincing. Convincing! From the people who did the 'Alien Endorses Clinton' story and the piece about the four-headed baby! Let me tell you what really happened. They found out about it. They're every­where. Big cities mainly, but even the smallest town has one or two. They're running everything. Your worst nightmare about the Mafia, the CIA, the Illuminati, all rolled into one. They read my submission and they squelched it! Sounds pretty damn paranoid, doesn't it? Welcome to the crackpot world of academia."

  "But what is a vampire?" I said. I was beginning to feel the Hunger again; just a prickle in my veins. Normally the blood of a whole young male would have kept me going for days, but it had been so long. I glanced down at myself, saw my papery skin, knew it would take a few more feedings to restore me to the semblance of life.

  "A vampire?" said Julia. "Why, you're a vampire. You drink blood. You live for a long, long time. You are a child of the shadows, a creature of the night."

  "True, but—are you saying that there are others?"

  "Are you saying that there aren't others?"

  "There was one other." It pained me to think of my young protege, the one who had betrayed King Moctezuma to the man-beasts, the one whom the black robes called Hortator, which signifies, in their language, the man who beats the drum to drive the galley-slaves who row in the Spaniards' men-o'-war, because of the drum he stole from me, made from the flayed skin of the god Xipe Totec himself, the one I thought would succeed me, but who instead had destroyed my whole world. "There was the god at first. He called me to his service. I had thought to hand on the power to another, but. . ."

  "That's where you're wrong, my friend," said Julia. "There's a whole network of you people. You have your tentacles in everything. You run this whole planet. You're in Congress. In the UN. In the damn White House, for all I know. And all top secret. Don't worry. I won't give you away. They have a certificate on file that says I'm a paranoid schizophrenic; so who'd believe me anyway?"

  "Even among the white men, people such as I?" It was hard to grasp.

  "The New World was a universe unto itself in I453. Maybe you were the only one here. Maybe your god came over the Bering Strait, nurtured his secret alone for twenty thousand years. Perhaps he forgot, even, that there was a race of creatures like himself. Perhaps, after millennia, he became lonely; who knows? Or he needed another cowherd. He made you. You, Nezahualcoyotl, coming of age with an entire continent for your domain, completely ignorant of the customs, traditions, laws, identities of your Kindred— a law unto yourself. They're not going to like you."

  "I think I'll have that drink now."

  Julia Epstein rose and went to a white rectangular cabinet. She opened it. A searing cold emanated from it, as though winter had been trapped within its con­fines. She drew out a skin of chilled blood; not a natu­ral skin, surely, for it was clear as water. "It's my own," she said. "I have a rare blood type, so I keep some around in case something happens to me and I need a quick transfusion. Yeah, more evidence of paranoia."

  She tossed the skin to me. I sank my teeth into the artificial skin. The blood was sweet, a little cloying, and freezing cold; then I remembered, from my child­hood, how much I had enjoyed the snow cones fla­vored with berry juice that the vendors used to bring down from the mountains; I savored the nostalgia. Twice today I'd had a remembrance of the distant past, before my changing. It is strange how one's childhood haunts one.

  Julia herself drank coffee, which she poured from a metal pot and blended with bleached sugar. She shook back her hair. I was taken aback at the immod­est way she stared at me; truly my god had no more power in this world, or she would have been trembling with awe. There was a faint odor of attraction about her; this woman desired me. And that was strange, for no Aztec woman would have dared think sexual thoughts about one who spoke directly to the gods.

  "You need me," she said. "You'll be flung into a cut­throat society of dozens of your kind, with bizarre hierarchies, internecine politics, games of control and domina­tion. You've been a
sleep for five hundred years, and since then there's been a mass emigration. They like it better in the New World; fewer preconceptions, the American dream and all that, and the prey are a lot less careful than back in old Wallachia. Where everyone believes in vampires, it's hard for one to catch a decent meal."

  "What? They do not give their blood willingly?" For that was the hardest new concept to grasp. Was it not the duty of humans to give freely of their flesh and blood that their gods might live? Was blood not the life-force that kept the sun and the stars in their courses?

  "Willingly!" said Julia. "You do have a lot to learn."

  "You'll help me."

  She smiled. "Of course. But only if you help me."

  "How?"

  "By telling me all about yourself."

  She unchained me, and I told her about the com­ing of the white men, and about Hortator's betrayal. And she in turn told me of her own people, who had once been nomads, who had crossed a tremendous desert to find a land flowing with milk and honey; who had made a covenant with a great and terrible deity who spoke in the voices of wind and fire; and I came to know of the vastness of the earth, and of how my people had been but one of many; how nations had risen and fallen, how even mankind itself had not always been the pinnacle of creation; how the great globe had formed out of the cold dust of the cosmos, and would one day return to dust.

  In time, I came to love her; and that in itself was a strange thing, for our kind do not feel love as mortals feel it.

  The man who came to be called Hortator belonged to me. I had captured him in the Flower Wars, which we hold each year when there are not enough captives from normal wars to feed the altars of the gods.

  This year the war was held in a plain not far from the city. Moctezuma himself had come to watch; on a knoll overlooking the battlefield, he and the enemy king, Cozcatl, picnicked on tortillas stuffed with ground iguana, braised in a sauce of pulped cocoa beans, which the man-beasts call chocolate. I, as the mouthpiece of the god, sat above Moctezuma on a ledge lined with jaguar skin and feathers. It was a pleasant afternoon; the courtiers were wolfing down their packed lunch while I sipped, from a sacred onyx cup, the blood of a young Mayan girl who had been sacrificed only that morning; yes, the blood had been cooled with snow from the slopes of the volcano.

  "It's not going well," said the king. "Look—the jaguar team has only snared about a hundred, and the quetzal team less than half that."

  Once touched by the sacred flower-wand which was the only weapon used in these artificial wars, a soldier was sent to the sacrificial pen. It was a great honor, of course, to be sacrificed, and a thing of beauty to behold those hordes of young men, oiled and gleam­ing, rushing across the grass to embrace their several destinies. "They seem more reluctant than usual, Your Majesty," I said.

  "Yes," said the king darkly. "I wonder why."

  "I think," I said, trying to put it to him delicately, "it has something to do with the man-beasts from the sea."

  "You'd think they'd be all the more anxious to get sacrificed, what with the present danger to the empire."

  "Yes, but they've been spreading sedition, Your Majesty. I've just come from the prison; they've been interrogating that black robe they captured—a high priest of sorts. He says that our sacrifices are ignorant superstition; that the sun will rise each morning with or without them; and he's been babbling about Hesuskristos, their god, who seems to be a garbled version of Xipe Totec."

  "You shouldn't say bad things about the man-beasts. Last night I dreamed that the Plumed Serpent was returning to claim his kingdom." He was speaking of Quetzalcoatl, the god-king who left our shores five hundred years before, vowing to come back.

  "Quetzalcoatl will not come back, Your Majesty."

  "How do you know? Am I not the king? Don't my dreams have the force of prophecy?"

  "You may have dreamt of him, Your Majesty; I, on the other hand, was his friend." It was because he lost the land in a wager that he had been forced to cross the ocean to look for a new kingdom, though that part of the story never made it into our mythology.

  "So you say, Nezahualcoyotl. You say that you're a thousand years old, and that you personally led our people out of the wilderness. That sort of thing is all very well for the peasants, Nezahualcoyotl. But I'm a modern king, and I know that you often use the lan­guage of metaphor in order to enhance the grandeur of the gods. No, no, I'm not blaming you; I'm a mean hand at propaganda myself. It's just that, well, you shouldn't believe your own—"

  It would not do to argue. I finished my blood in silence.

  "Anyhow, I think we should have a bit of propaganda right now, Nezahualcoyotl. Why don't you go down there and lead the jaguar team personally? Give them a bit of that old-time religion. Stir up their juices."

  "Sire, at my age—"

  "Nonsense. Guard, give him one of those flower-wands."

  I sighed, took the wand, and went down the hill.

  The war was being conducted in an orderly fashion.

  Seeing me, members of the jaguar team made a space for me. I gave a brief and cliche-ridden harangue about the cycles of the cosmos; then it was time to charge. Boys banged on humanskin drums; musicians began a noisy caterwauling of flutes, cymbals, and shrilling voices that sang of the coming of Huitzilopochtli to the Mexica. The armies ran toward each other, chanting their war-songs, each soldier seeking out a good quarry. I too ran; not with super­natural swiftness, but like a man, my bare feet pound­ing the ground. Above us, the whistle of the atl-atl and the whine of flower-tipped arrows. The armies met. I searched for a suitable captive that would honor the god. I saw a man in the farthest rank of the enemy, more child than man, his limbs perfectly formed, his eyes darting fearfully from side to side. There was someone who saw no honor in dying for the god! I elbowed aside three pains of combatants and came upon him suddenly, looming above him as he ducked behind a tree.

  "I am your death," I said. "Give yourself up; give honor to the gods."

  I touched him with the flower-wand. He glanced at it, took it, stared me defiantly in the eye.

  "I won't do it," he said.

  I knew then that he had been polluted by the preachings of the man-beasts. A fury erupted in me. I said, "Why have you been listening to them? Don't you know that they're only human beings? That they bleed and die like ordinary men?"

  But he began to run. I was surprised by his speed. He leaped over a bush, sprinted away from the mass of warriors toward a field of maize that bordered the battleground. My first impulse was to let him go—for there was no honor in sacrificing so abject a creature to Hummingbird—but my anger grew and grew as I watched him shrinking into the distance. I could stand it no longer. I called upon the strength of the jaguar and the swiftness of the rabbit; I funneled into the very wind; soon I was upon him again. He turned, saw me running beside him, matching him pace for pace. I could smell his terror; terror was only natural; what I could not smell was the joy, equally natural, that a man should feel when he is about to embrace the source of all joy, to die that the sun might live. He was less than a man. Only an animal could feel this terror of dying without also feeling the exhilaration. I decided to kill him as he ran. I reached out. He strug­gled, but I drew on my inner strength; I pinned him to the ground. The corn encircled us. Only the gods heard what we said to one another.

  "I won't go," he said again. "Kill me now, but I won't die to feed a god that doesn't even exist."

  "Doesn't exist!" My anger rose up, naked and terri­ble. I started to throttle him. The odor of his fear filled my nostrils. It was intoxicating. I wanted to feed on him right then and there. I could feel his jugular throbbing against my fingers. I knew that his blood was clean and unpolluted with alcohol or coca leaf. His blood was pure as the waters of the mountain; but I could not kill him. "How long were you among the man-beasts?"

  "Three years."

  I had to let him live. He knew about the foreigners, their languages, their savage ways. I could not kill him un
til he had divulged all he knew. With a fingernail I scratched his arm, sucked out a few droplets to assuage my Hunger. I had to bind him to me. He could become a secret weapon; perhaps I could stave off the end of the world after all.

  If only I had listened to the voice of Hummingbird! But I wanted to halt the wheel of time, and though I was a thousand years old I was still too young to understand that there is no stopping time.

  "Who are you?" I said.

  "I don't know. I don't have a name anymore; I've forgotten it. The Spanish called me Hortator. It pleased them to let me beat the drum on one of their galley ships. I've even been to Spain—that part of Spain that they call Cuba."

  "Why aren't you still with them?"

  "Pirates, Lord High Priest. I escaped; the others are dead, every one of them."

  "And the man-beast who is called Cortez, who the king thinks is the god Quetzalcoatl, returned to reclaim his inheritance?"

  "I don't know of him. The man-beasts are many— dozens of nations and languages. And all of them are coming here. They want gold."

  I laughed; what was so valuable about gold, that would make these creatures come across the ocean in their islands made of wood? Was gold then their god?

  "No, my Lord. They worship Xipe Totec; their name for him is Hesuskristos."

  When I escorted my prisoner back to the pen, it was getting late. Moctezuma was bored and listless; Cozcatl was annoyed at having lost the war, though it would hardly have been good manners for him to be victorious over his sovereign lord. The two kings applauded as I approached them, and bade me eat with them; they had a fresh haunch roasting. "Excellent meat," said the king. "She was good in bed, too."

  "You did her great honor, Sire, to inseminate her, sacrifice her, and eat her, all with your own hands."

  "It was the Queen's idea, actually; she had been getting uppity. But what have we here?" He eyed my captive with interest. "A powerful-looking fellow; I didn't know you had it in you to bring in so fine a specimen."