Strange City Read online

  He cast his eye about for his obsidian knife; when the king particularly favored someone, he was apt to sacrifice him on the spot. I had to think quickly to pro­tect my source of information. "Your Majesty," I said, "the god has told me that this man is to be the next Unblemished Youth."

  "Oh," said the king, disappointed, "we'll have to wait until the big ceremony, then." To Hortator he said, "You're a very lucky young man; you'll have the best in food, drink, and women, including four holy brides; until you're sacrificed, a year from now, you'll be worshipped as a god. Even I will have to bow to you, though you mustn't get any grand ideas."

  "Yes, Sire," said Hortator. I could tell he was grate­ful for his reprieve. Perhaps, in time, I would be able to wash away the silly notions the man-beasts had planted in his mind. A year was time enough, surely, to persuade him to look forward to being sacrificed properly.

  "You were planning to deprogram him!" Julia said, having by then become somewhat drunk. I myself was on my second skin of blood; my appearance was far less corpselike than it had been in the exhibit hall.

  "I'd better take you home with me," she went on. "At least until you figure out what you're going to do with yourself. I mean—no credit cards, no social secu­rity number, no car—you could be in for some culture shock."

  I was not sure what she was talking about, but a few hours later I was numb from confusion. I had rid­den in a thing called BART, which is a cylindrical metal wagon that runs through tubes under the earth; I had been driven in a horseless chariot across a bridge that seemed to hang on wires above the ocean; I had seen buildings shaped like phalluses, strutting up into the sky; and the people! Tenochtitlan at its most crowded had not been like this. San Francisco— named, so Julia told me, after a nature god of the Spaniards—was a hundred times as crowded. There were people of many colors, and their costumes beg­gared description. In my feathers, leggings, and pen­dulous jade earrings, I must have looked a little odd; yet no one stared at me. This was a people accus­tomed to strangeness.

  At length we reached Julia's home, an apartment within one of those tall buildings, reached by means of a little chamber on pulleys which seemed much more efficient than stairs; I could see that I was going to enjoy the many conveniences of this alien world.

  Her home was an odd little place; she lived alone, without parents or children, without even any ser­vants; and the apartment, though crammed with laborsaving devices, was little bigger than a peasant's hovel, and considerably more claustrophobic.

  We had been there for only moments when she thrust herself at me. Her blood was racing, and scented with erotic secretions. She kissed me. I tasted blood on her chapped lips. I pulled away. "Be careful," I said. "I don't have the same desires as you. I don't feel lust. Not like that."

  "Then teach me the other kind of lust."

  "I'm afraid you would not like it."

  "Yes, yes, I know the desolation, the loneliness of eternity. I don't care! Don't you understand? I've always wanted to be a vampire. I've never been able to get this close to one before. Not for certain. I'm a historian. I want to get the long view. I want to see man's destiny unfold, bit by bit. I hate being a human being."

  "It's not what you think it is." How could I tell her about those flashes from my childhood, those faded images that still haunted me with their unattainable vividness? My world is a gray world; only the infusion of blood brings to it a fleeting color, and that only a simulacrum of color, awakened by long-lost memories; now, five hundred years beyond the end of the world, I had become even more of a tragicomic figure. How could this woman ever know, unless I made her know? And then, poor thing, there would be no turning back.

  I did not want to make her like me. I had tried that once. It had not eased my loneliness. And my creation had betrayed me. But the woman could be useful. For now I would pretend to hold out the possibility that she might one day become immortal.

  "Make love to me," she said.

  She smiled a half-smile and beckoned me into an inner room. There were mirrors everywhere. With great deliberation, she began to remove her clothing. There was a pleasing firmness to her, though she was not young. An Aztec woman of her years would have been worn out, her fists hardened from pounding laundry or tortillas. It would be necessary for me to go through the motions of lovemaking. In the end I did not mind. She had been menstruating.

  Afterwards, I lay on the bed and watched her sitting at the mirror, painting her face. She opened a drawer and took out a gold pendant in the shape of a cruci­fied man. Suddenly I understood why I had not per­ished along with the rest of the world. I had unfinished business.

  "Where did you get that amulet from?"

  "You recognize it, don't you?" She stood up, clad only in the pendant and her long dark hair. "I'm afraid you're not the first vampire I've dated. Actually I wasn't entirely sure he was one, until now. They don't make a habit of telling. But you've just confirmed it."

  "I have to find the person who gave it to you."

  "I'll take you to him," she said.

  Once more we crossed the bay in the steel chariot; once more my memories came flooding back.

  They had seemed insane to me, those man-beasts; there were only a handful of them, yet they scoured the land as though they were an army of thousands. In only a short while they had conquered a city but a day's journey from Tenochtitlan. But in the palace of Moctezuma there was a strange calm. I did not know why. Each day, I sacrificed the requisite numbers of victims at the appropriate hours; I did nothing that dishonored the gods.

  Except, of course, for the little lie I had told my king; it had not been Huitzilopochtli who had com­manded that the man Hortator be consecrated as the Unblemished Youth. I had said so to ensure that the man would survive and remain useful to me. It was not the first time I had invoked the voice of the Hummingbird to bring about some personal decision. When one has been the mouthpiece of the god for centuries at a time, there are times when one's identity becomes blurred. Besides, what harm could it do? Hortator was the perfect choice, even if the god had not made it himself.

  I visited him each evening in the compound sacred to Xipe Totec, where the four sacred handmaidens dressed him, bathed him, and tended to his sexual needs, for he was no longer free to walk about the city at will. He was, indeed, unblemished, a prime speci­men of Aztec manhood, lean, tall, well proportioned, and fine featured. The god would be pleased when the day came for him to be flayed alive so that his skin could be worn by the priest of Xipe Totec in the annual ceremony that heals and renews the wounded earth and brings forth the rains of spring. There was only one thing wrong with it all; the Unblemished Youth did not seem particularly honored by the attention. It was all most unusual, a sign of the decadence of those times.

  "I don't want to do it," he told me, "because I don't believe in it." For a nonbeliever he was certainly reaping its benefits—being massaged by one handmaiden, being fed by another, and the gods alone knew what was going on under the gold-edged table behind which he sat. "I mean that it's no use; the blood of human sac­rifices isn't what makes the sun rise each morning; the god of the man-beasts is clearly more powerful than Huitzilopochtli even as Hummingbird was mightier than the gods who came before. I don't mind the pain so much as the fact that I'd be dying for no reason."

  "You've been poisoning the king's mind, too, haven't you?" I said. For Moctezuma seemed to have lost all interest in the future of his empire.

  "I am the Unblemished Youth," he pointed out. "It was your idea. And as you know, that means that my advice comes from the gods."

  "You hear no voices from the sky!" I said. "It's all pretense with you."

  "And what voice from the gods told you that I was to be kept alive to teach you the ways of the white men?"

  He knew I had lied. Only one whose mind had already been tainted by the man-beasts' ideas would even have imagined such a thing. "But i do hear voices," I said.

  "Then let me hear one too."

  "A
ll right."

  I told him to follow me. We took a subterranean pas­sageway—for he could not be seen to wander the streets of the city—that angled downward, deep under the great pyramid of Huitzilopochtli. The walls were damp and had a natural coolness from the waters that seeped underground from the great lake of Tenochtitlan. Hortator stopped to admire the bas-reliefs which depicted the history of the Mexica people in their long migration toward the promised land; there were sculptures in niches in the stone, some decorated with fresh human skulls or decaying flowers, some so weathered that they could no longer be identified, being the gods of unremembered peoples who had long since been conquered and assimilated by the Mexica; many parts of the tunnel were ill-kept; our torches burned but dimly here, far from the outside air.

  At length we reached a chamber so sacred that even King Moctezuma had never set foot within it. It was guarded by the god of a civilization far older than ours— Um-Tzec, the Mayan god of death, whose skull-face was etched into the stone that blocked the entrance.

  I whispered a word in the long-forgotten Olmec language, and the stone slid aside to reveal the cham­ber. Hortator gasped as he read in the flickering torch­light the calendar symbols and the glyphs that lined the walls.

  "But—" he said, "this is the lost tomb of Nezahualcoyotl, your namesake, the first great king of the Aztecs!"

  I smiled. I held up my torch so he could see all that the room contained—treasures of gold from ancient cities—magical objects and amulets—and a great sar­cophagus, carved from solid obsidian.

  "The tomb is empty!" he gasped.

  "Yes," I said, "it is, and always will be, by the sacred grace and will of Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird of the Left."

  "The black robes told me of creatures like you. I've never seen you eat; you seem to subsist on blood. You're one of the undead, a creature of the devil. You sleep by day in your own coffin, and by night you prey on human blood."

  I laughed. "What strange notions these man-beasts have! Though I admit that I have sometimes taken a nap inside the sarcophagus. It's roomy, and very con­ducive to meditation."

  I showed him the treasures. Every one of them had an ancient tale attached to it, or some mystic power. The ring of concealment and the jewel for scrying the past. The great drum fashioned from Xipe Totec's skin, which, when beaten, confers the power of celerity. "Feel it, touch its tautness. That is your skin too, for you are Xipe Totec."

  "There is only one Xipe Totec, who gave his life for the redemption of the world, who was killed and rose again on the third day."

  "I'm glad the Spaniards haven't robbed you of that truth!"

  "On the contrary," he said, "they taught it to me. And they say that theirs is the real Xipe Totec, and yours is an illusion, the work of the powers of dark­ness." He pulled out an amulet from a fold of his feather robe, and showed me the image of Hesuskristos; a suffering god indeed, nailed to a tree, his torso cruelly pierced, his scalp ripped by thorns. "It is an admirable god," I said, "but I see no reason why, accepting one, you must heap scorn on the other."

  "Oh, they are not so different, the new gods and the old. The black robes have sacrifices too; they burn the victims alive in a public ceremony called auto-da-fe, after first subjecting them to fiendish tortures—"

  "Wonderful," I said, "at least they have some of the rudiments of civilization."

  "I did not say their god was better, Nezahualcoyotl; only that he is stronger. Now show me how your god speaks."

  "I will need blood."

  "Take mine," he said.

  I took my favorite blood-cup carved from a single, flawless piece of jade, and murmured a prayer over it. I did not want to scar the Unblemished Youth; I knelt before him and pricked him lightly in the groin with the fingernail of my left pinky, which I keep sharpened for that purpose; I drained an ounce or so into the blood-cup, then seared the wound shut with a dab of my saliva. The drawing of blood caused the man to close his eyes. He whimpered; I knew not if it was from pain or ecstasy. I called on Huitzilopochtli, drained the blood-cup, tossed it aside. The warmth shot through my ancient veins, pierced my unbeating heart; it was a bitter blood, a blood of destiny. I emp­tied out my soul. I waited for the god to speak.

  And presently it came, a faint whisper in my left ear, like the fluttering of tiny wings. I could not see Huitzilopochtli—no one has ever seen him—but his still small voice lanced my very bones like the thun­derous erupting of Popocatapetl itself. The world has turned in on itself, said the god, and the fire of the sun has turned to ashes.

  "But—what have we done wrong? Didn't we slaugh­ter hecatombs of warriors to your glory? Didn't we mortify our own flesh, build pyramids whose points grazed the very dwelling places of your Kindred?"

  The god laughed. The cosmos dances, he said. We are at peace.

  In my trance state I saw Hortator standing before me, no longer in the consecrated raiment of Xipe Totec, but naked, nailed to a tree, the skin scourged from his back, the blood streaming from his side and down his face, and I cried out, "You abomination! You travesty of the true faith!" and I rushed toward him. When I was with the god I was more powerful than any human. I could rip him in pieces with my bare hands. I had him by the throat, was throttling the life from him—

  You will not kill him, said the god. All at once, the strength left my hands. Instead, you will make him immortal.

  "He doesn't deserve—"

  Obey me! He, too, is a prophet, of a sort. Do you not understand that he who rises to godhead, who creates a world, a people, a destiny, plants inevitably within his creation the seeds of his own destruction? All life is so—and the gods, who are the pinnacle of life, are as subject to its laws as any other creatures.

  It seemed to me that I no longer understood the god as clearly as I had once, when I came down from the high mountain to bring his message to a tribe of wanderers. His words were confused now, tainted. But he was the god, and I obeyed him without thought. I knelt once more before Hortator, and I began to feed, mindless now of damaging his flesh, for I knew that he would never have to suffer the rites of Xipe Totec. I fed and fed until there was no more blood at all, and then, slashing my lip with my razor fingernail, I moistened his lips with a few drops of my own millennial blood, blood that ran cold as the waters under the earth.

  I cried out: "Do you see now the power of Huitzilopochtli? I have killed you and brought you back from the dead; I have awakened you to the world of eternal cold ..."

  But Hortator only laughed, and he said to me, "I heard nothing. No hummingbird whispered in my left ear. The black robes were right; your gods do not exist."

  "My gods have made you immortal!"

  "I am already immortal; for the black robes have sprinkled me with their water of life."

  I could not understand what had happened. Why had the god commanded me to make him my Kindred, then allowed him to mock me? Why could Hortator not hear the voice of the deity when it reverberated in my very bones? The very fabric of the world was unraveling. For the first time in a thousand years, I was afraid. At first I could not even recognize the emotion, it was so alien; it was almost thrilling. I reached back farther and farther through the cobwebs of memory. I saw myself as a child, scurrying beneath my mother's blanket, flee­ing the music of the night. With fear came a kind of melancholy, for I knew that I would never again truly feel what it was like to be alive.

  Once, it seemed, I walked with my god; daily, hourly I heard his voice echo and reecho in my heart. Then came a time when he spoke to me but rarely, and usu­ally only in the context of the blood-ritual. And now and then, I began to speak for him, inventing his words, for the people did not hear him unless I first heard him; it was I who was his prophet. Was it those little lies that had made my god abandon me now?

  I cried out, "Oh, Huitzilopochtli, Huitzilopochtli, why hast thou forsaken me?" But the god did not see fit to respond.

  We stopped at a bazaar to buy clothes more suitable to my surroundings. Julia picked
out some black leg­gings which could be pulled over my loincloth, shoes made from animal skins, and an overshirt of some soft white material; she paid for the items with a rect­angular plaque, which the vendor slid through a metal device, after which she made some mysterious marks on a square of parchment.

  Then we drove on to another part of the city, one where the buildings were more ornate, not the mono­lithic towers of stone and glass I had seen before. We stopped in front of a low, unpretentious-looking building; Julia bade me follow her.

  Inside, the surroundings were considerably more ostentatious. There were paintings, a floor covered with some kind of red-tinted fur, the pieces joined together so invisibly that one could not tell what animal it had come from. The place was full of all manner of people, jabbering away in many accents, though I did not hear anyone speak Nahuatl; perhaps my native tongue had gone the way of the language of the Olmecs.

  We stood, a little uncomfortably—for though no one questioned our being there, no one made us wel­come—and I began to notice a pervasive sickliness in the air—the sweetness of putrefying flesh that has been doused in cloying perfume—I knew that it was the odor of the dead—I knew that I was in the pres­ence of others of my kind—not one or two but dozens of them. What had happened in the past five hundred years? Had I been reborn into a world of vampires? Again fear flecked my feelings, the same fear I had felt when I doubted my gods for the first time.

  "Your friend is sometimes to be found there," lulia said. She pointed to a door, half-hidden by shadows. "Go along. I'll stay here and have a glass of wine."

  "You're not coming with me?"

  "I can't," she said. "No human being has ever come out of that room alive. But if you're really what I say you are, you won't have any trouble. That room," she went on, her voice dropping to a whisper, "is the Vampire Club."

  "Why are you whispering?"

  "I'm not supposed to know." Her eyes sparkled. I could see that she loved to flirt with danger; that was why she was so obsessed with my kind.