Aztec Century (34 page)
‘Did he tell you who we were?’
Off-handedly he said, ‘Sisters from London. Got a bit of money behind you, have you?’
‘Who said that?’
He obviously found me strange, and perhaps was trying to be casual in response.
‘I just assumed. With neither of you working, like.’
Was this simple inquisitiveness? Or an echo of the other Bevan’s insolence? Did he really know something?
‘Was there someone living here before us?’ I asked.
‘Headmaster of the school,’ he said, obviously referring to the one above us on the hill. ‘He moved to Newport when it shut down. It’s been empty this past year or more. Pleasant spot, I reckon, with the river close by and no one to bother you.’ He sucked on his teeth. ‘Well, I’d best be going. See you in a week. If there’s anything extra you need, the number’s in the book. It’s the Gwalia Stores in town. Castle Street, up by the town clock. You can’t miss it.’
I followed him out to the door. He climbed into the van and started the engine. I had the impression he was eager to be going.
The driver’s window was open. I went up to it as he revved the engine.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked, a tremor in my voice.
But he was already pulling away.
Five months have passed since we first arrived here, and all my efforts to discover some firm evidence of our former lives have failed. Even if I had been so inclined, it would have proved difficult to travel widely because Victoria becomes agitated if we are away from the cottage for any length of time; and I share her tendency to want to huddle there.
Despite this, I did make several forays at first, forcing Victoria to accompany me to Tredegar, where the Gwalia Stores indeed exist. I watched Bevan serving customers inside but did not enter myself. Of course, I’m not certain his name is Bevan because the store front gives no proprietor and I’m afraid to ask any of the locals. I’m afraid to ask them in case they confirm it, or in case they don’t. Somehow uncertainty seems preferable, though I can’t rationally explain why. I refused even to consult the telephone directory, which might not, in any case, be conclusive. Bevan is a common name in this part of the world, a legacy of the English conquest of Wales, as on my Earth.
On that same visit, I steeled myself to go into the local bank, where it was confirmed that an account had indeed been opened in my name – Catherine Marlborough, the family name my great-grandfather adopted when he ascended the throne. Moneys from a trust fund would pay a net annual income of fifteen thousand pounds a year – more than enough to live on. Why such
generosity? I wondered. It would have been far easier, and more cruel, for Extepan to have dumped us here penniless. Was it in deference to our former status? Or was he not yet finished with us?
It was difficult to establish the facts behind the trust fund without revealing my utter ignorance and thus arousing suspicion, but eventually I was allowed to speak by telephone to someone from the parent bank in London. He sounded businesslike and very English, and gave every impression of knowing nothing about the Aztecs, of being no part in any duplicity on their behalf. By a tortuous process involving equal measures of dissembling and strategic absent-mindedness, I was able to establish that Victoria and I were supposedly the daughters of a diplomat who had been lost, with his wife, in an aircraft which had disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico – my heart quailed at this – two years before. Victoria was ill through a shock reaction to their deaths, but arrangements had been made in my father’s will to provide for us. We had lived much of our lives in the Americas, and had no friends or relatives here.
I did not press the matter. No doubt all the relevant documentation existed, expertly faked and on file. Presumably the Aztecs had been sending their agents into this world for long enough to have built up impeccable identities as well as funds to support their operations. It was possible their agents in London would be British citizens from my world, collaborators with the Aztec Empire who could move with complete confidence through this Britain.
Not a day passed when I didn’t look, in my surroundings or in newspapers and television programmes, for evidence of Aztec infiltration. I was certain someone from that world would have been put close by to watch over us. But I could never pinpoint anything. My suspicions tended to focus more and more on our new Bevan, a true native of this world, I was sure, but too much the
alter ego
of his enigmatic and elusive counterpart. Perhaps this Bevan had been recruited by the other one, was serving masters in my world. He called every week with our groceries, and while there was never anything in his manner to suggest this, his very presence and continual off-hand curiosity about us suggested a link. He was the only person I could identify directly
with my own world, no matter that he differed from his progenitor. There were times when I wanted to ask him outright, but I could never muster the courage. I was torn between the need to know the truth and a fear of reopening terrible wounds. Victoria, for her part, showed absolutely no reaction when they finally encountered one another. Either something in her flatly refused to recognize him, or the abominations which had wiped away her sanity had also erased all memory of our past life.
So I vacillated, until one day I decided that there might be another means of confirming the truth. One Saturday, with a nervous Victoria in tow, I took a train to Paddington, and from there we travelled by Underground and suburban railway to Crystal Palace. I already knew that the palace in this world had been destroyed by fire decades before our own, but I had not come for that. I led Victoria through the park, down the hill towards the lake where the Quetzalcoatl structure had stood. On our world, it was the staging point for a tunnel into this one. And every entrance has an exit.
As we approached, I heard rhythmic percussive music. It was evening, and a small crowd was sitting on the big grassy bowl fronting the lake, watching a steel band play on a stage which had been built over it.
Behind the stage, there was only a chalet-like building with a black felt roof, too small to house any kind of secret installation. How could this be? Did the tunnel only generate its exit when it was activated? Or did the infiltrators from my world simply blink into existence in this one after transference? But that would allow them no means of getting back, whereas Extepan had told me Aztec agents regularly returned after their explorations.
The building was a drab municipal structure, used for storage and fenced off. I searched the surroundings thoroughly, rooting in the leaf litter under sycamore and holly trees for the smallest piece of evidence, an artefact or item inadvertently dropped, something disposable carelessly thrown away – a cigarette butt, a
tzictli
wrapper, a button or ring or footprint which indisputably came from my Aztec world. Anything would have convinced me. But there was nothing.
Victoria was agitated with the noise of the steel band, unsettled by the disruption and strangeness of London. It was growing
dark, and I knew I had to get her home to the cottage that same day. I made one last desperate reconnoitre.
Nothing.
The fruitless visit to London undermined my confidence more than I first imagined. As the weeks turned into months and I remained ensconced in the cottage with Victoria, so our past lives seemed to me to become more like a dream, a mere figment of my own imaginings, while this world pressed its claims as the only true reality simply because we had to live in it day by day, to accept its domesticities and the sheer weight of its own normalcy. I think the aftereffects of the Aztec drugs intensified this impression, distancing me from my memories, making them seem surreal.
Perhaps that’s why I decided to write this account, to try to restore their legitimacy. Yet sometimes I wonder whether it may have the reverse effect, whether to put things down in words, make a story of them, is to make them fiction. Sometimes I imagine the Bevan of this world as a true innocent. I imagine him coming upon these pages and reading them. What would he think? That they were the deluded ramblings of a lonely woman who has to care for a debilitated sister in a part of the country where she knows no one? That I wrote them as a fantasy to divert and deliver myself from the drab realities of everyday existence? That I am, myself, mad?
Yet I hold to my beliefs, despite my growing doubts. I have to. And there are small victories, affirmations of the past which I cling to. A few days ago, while rummaging in the dressing-table drawer, I came upon a necklace secreted at the back. A bead necklace of jade and obsidian. Extepan’s betrothal gift to me.
Every evening, when my work is done and Victoria is safely in bed, I go to the window and stare down the valley. I watch and wait. Extepan hasn’t finished with us yet, I’m certain of that, otherwise he wouldn’t have provided for us. He wouldn’t have put us here, in this place, he wouldn’t have left the necklace as a remembrance, he wouldn’t have arranged for this other Bevan to be on hand. He hasn’t finished with us because he’s scarcely started with this world. The Aztecs now rule mine, but they live by conquest. I know it’s only a matter of time before they build tunnels big enough to send whole armies through, tunnels which
will enable them to extend their empire by conquering another world. Here, things are different, and they will find armies aplenty to test their mettle. But none, ultimately, to resist them. In the end, their onslaught will be irresistible.
I don’t know when it will come, but I’m certain it shall. So I sit at the window each evening, turning the necklace in my hands, looking down the valley while Victoria sleeps and the house lies silent around me. I search the skies for points of light which will tell me that at last it has begun, at last it has begun again.
They will come in their shining ships to conquer and destroy, barbarians of gold and feathers and serpents of fire. There are days when I firmly believe this, days when I consider it an absurd delusion. Every evening I watch and wait with fear and longing.
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Aztec Century
Capella’s Golden Eyes
Chimeras
Icetower
In Limbo
Mortal Remains
Omega
The Insider
The Twilight Realm
(writing as Christopher Carpenter)
Christopher Evans (1951–)
Born in Wales in 1951, Christopher Evans won the BSFA award in 1993 for his novel
Aztec Century
. In the 1980s, he co-edited three
Other Edens
anthologies with Robert Holdstock, and as well as the science fiction published under his own name, he is the author of a number of well received books for younger readers under the pseudonym Nathan Elliott, and a handful of film novelisations. His recent work,
Omega
, was his first for adults in almost a decade.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Christopher Evans 1993
All rights reserved.
The right of Christopher Evans to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10255 2
This eBook produced by
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
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