Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon (19 page)

“And it might not. We must be prepared for all eventualities. That is our task, Serizawa. If we fail … then honor will have to be satisfied. Do you understand me?”

He did. He said, “I suppose I shall go back to the laboratory, work a while longer on those leg pistons.…”

Morioka smiled. “Take as long as you need to, Serizawa.” He inclined his head. “The Meiji shall be indebted to you for your work.”

*   *   *

He worked until he fell forward on his worktop and slept for fifteen fitful minutes, before waking sharply from dreams that were drenched in men's blood. The whole building was deserted, and Serizawa decided he was no use to anyone exhausted. He wound his way quickly home along the empty streets, peering out between the buildings at the dark sea and the terror that every wave brought closer to Nyu Edo.

He tried to slip quietly into bed but Akiko said coldly, “I am not asleep. Why are you so late?”

“Science Officer Morioka,” he said helplessly.

Akiko turned toward him. “Haruki, you have to tell that man you are not a slave. You have a family. You are not paid to work every hour of the day.”

“My work—”

“Yes, I know,” she sighed. “Your work is very important. Your child is also very important, Haruki. Your wife is very important. Is this about your father? He might be hailed as the finest scientist in all of Japan, the man who has kept the emperor alive beyond his years. Let them say that, Haruki! You do not have to compete with your father! You do not have to drive yourself into a grave trying to … to trump him! Is that what you want? To be a better man than your father, or die trying?”

He sat up in bed, suddenly gripped by a fear that rolled in like fog off the sea. He took his wife by her shoulders. “Tomorrow, you and Michi must come and stay with me.”

Akiko shrugged him off and sat up. “Stay with you? What are you talking about?”

“In the laboratory. There are rooms where no one ever goes. You can stay there.”

“Do not be ridiculous.” Akiko pouted. “Why would we want to do that when we have a perfectly good home here?”

“Nyu Edo isn't safe,” he said. Panic was rising within him. “It isn't safe.”

The screen to the bedroom slid back and Michi stood in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. “What are you shouting about?”

“We're not shouting, Prickly Pear,” said Serizawa softly. “Go back to bed.”

Michi ignored him and wriggled in between her parents. Akiko smoothed her hair and whispered, “What do you mean,
not safe
? Do you know something? The British, or the Spanish…?”

He shook his head. “There is a place … an island. It is called sector thirty-one.”

“A lovely name,” said Akiko. “Why does this matter to us?”

“They keep …
things
there. One has gotten loose. It is headed this way.”

Akiko snuggled down beside the gently snoring Michi. “I think you have been drinking sake with Science Officer Morioka, Haruki, not working hard. What kind of
things
?”

He looked at the pale outline of the moon shining through the paper blind over the window and waited a long time before answering. Akiko had fallen back asleep, her breathing in rhythm with Michi's. He felt flooded with love for them, and fear. He whispered, “Monsters.”

 

14

T
HE
L
ORD
OF
THE
S
TAR
OF
THE
D
AWN

A group of children was playing with an inflated pig's bladder in the shadow of the hills that sheltered the Yaqui village from the sun and the winds that could tear through the canyon, especially in the colder months. They kicked the makeshift ball among themselves, the older ones showing off their skills at passing it from foot to knee to head to foot again before kicking it on to their neighbor. Chantico watched them for a while. He had always enjoyed playing kickball, at least when he was still considered a youth. He was a man now, and he was expected to put such things behind him. He had completed the journey into manhood, had undergone the five tasks, one for each of the five worlds that made up the
ania
where they all lived. He had ventured out into the desert wilderness world, and he had run ceaselessly for a day and a night. He had embraced the tallest cactus in the valley and in pain found the doorway into the flower world. He had found in the night world his totem animal, which was
Wo'i
the coyote, like his father's had been and his father's before him. He had gone to sleep and woken with full knowledge of the deer song, imparted to him in the dreamworld. And in the mystical world … in the mystical world he had passed through the unbreakable rock into the place of power, deep within the bowels of the sandstone mesa that loomed over the village. There he had passed fully into manhood, and into the embrace of secrets.

The pig's bladder came rolling over to him. Chantico deftly flicked it up with the toe of his slipper, keeping it aloft with his knee, then volleyed it back to the children, who applauded and whistled and begged him to stay and join their game.

But Chantico, who had just left the abandoned mine and its eventful day of spirits and clockwork women and Texans and not even a tumble in the shadows with beautiful Inez, was a man now, and he had to put away childish things. He needed to organize a meeting of the
kopolai
. But first, he could see his mother and father outside their tent, and even at this distance the frowns on their faces were evident.

*   *   *

The settlement was largely composed of the wigwams belonging to the tribe's main family groups, with the smaller tents of older children who had started families of their own dotted around the grand filial tents. There had also been a move to create more permanent wooden huts, a sign that the Yaqui thought this spot was particularly blessed. The hunting and fishing were certainly good, and the camp was well situated for defending. But the advantage was not just its location. The camp had once, centuries before, been a town or even a rudimentary city. There were stonework buildings, or at least the footprints of them, one of which had been built up again to form the meetinghouse of the tribal elders. The Spanish, back in the days when they were seeking to conquer and tame all this land, must have wiped out the settlement. That, according to
Yoemyo'otui,
the Old Man, meant the place was drenched in spirits. It was the Old Man who had found the place of power in the caves, and even Chantico and the others had felt the emanations rising from its rocks, felt the lives that still reverberated through the five worlds from the black stains on the flat rock that the Old Man said could be nothing other than an altar, for nothing else but sacrifice.

“Chantico!” His father, Noshi, was standing with his arms folded in front of their wigwam, Chantico's mother behind him. He had told them he was going with the trading party to the Spanish towns to the south; he had evidently timed his return badly. The trading party must have returned already, or were not back yet. Either way, his lie was exposed.

“Father, Mother,” he said, bowing to both of them. He was shocked when his mother broke ranks and ran to him, hitching up her skirt, and embraced him tightly.

“Oh, Chantico, thank the spirits,” she said. “You are alive.”

“Of course I am,” he said. Had word reached the camp about the Texans who had tried to ravish Inez and kill him? But how? Chichijal? But that was impossible.

“We had word from a scout of the tribe that inhabits the valley between the three mesas,” said Noshi grimly. “Our trading party … they have been slaughtered. All dead. Or so we thought.”

“Texan raiders?” asked Chantico. All dead. His friend Ecatzin usually went out with the traders, with the moccasins his wife made. Chantico felt suddenly sick.

His father said, “Why don't you tell us? You were with them, correct? You will know if it was Steamtown boys. Or maybe you weren't with the traders after all, hmm, Chantico?”

“Thank the spirits he wasn't!”

“Hush, woman,” murmured Noshi. “He has lied to us.” He looked back to Chantico. “You have been spending time with
Yoemyo'otui,
haven't you? The Old Man? He is wicked, Chantico. He is what the Spanish call
brujo,
yes? A witch-man. I do not want you wasting your time with him.”

“He is not wicked!” Chantico pouted. “He is of the old people! He will save our tribe.”

Chantico's father waved his arm around the camp, at the protective wall of the cliffs, at the tall grasses in which deer grazed and rabbits burrowed, at the cold stream in which spawning salmon leapt. “Save us from
what,
Chantico?”

“From those who would cause us harm,” he said. “Steamtown.”

“Speaking of the dead, perhaps you had better go and pay your respects to Ecatzin's mother, and the others,” said his father. “Then you can do some chores, perhaps atone for your lies and deceit.”

Instead, Chantico went straight to find the Old Man.

*   *   *

No one knew his name anymore. They simply called him
Yoemyo'otui,
or the Old Man. And the Old Man didn't give his name out. Names were power, he said, and if your enemy knew your name you might as well have put your balls in his hand and given him your knife. He pointed at each of them in turn in the circle around the pale fire deep in the caves, and he recited their names, giving their imaginary balls a twist with his gnarled hand.

The Old Man was supposed to be able to remember Cortez taking Tenochtitlán, but Chantico had once pointed out that that would make the Old Man hundreds of years old. The Old Man had shrugged and said, “What of it?” He was Aztec, he said, purebred and, yes, if that was what people wanted to say,
brujo
. Witch-man. He had rattled bones and torn still-beating hearts out of living chests. No one really knew when or why the Old Man had attached himself to the tribe. He once said that it was because the Yaqui were the only people the Spanish had never properly conquered, and that the Yaqui would save the Americas from the invaders. He spoke a lot of nonsense, but he did it in an insistent, seductive manner. No one really took the Old Man seriously.

Until Quetzalcoatl came.

*   *   *

After a hurried conversation outside the Old Man's wigwam, Chantico was dispatched to spread the word that a meeting would take place in the caves within the half hour. A year ago, their gatherings had attracted only half a dozen people; now those who stole away from the camp to make their way to the place of power numbered twenty; Chantico could only imagine the puzzled expressions on the faces of his parents as they scratched their heads and wondered where all the young people had gone. Soon the time would be right for the Old Man to assume his rightful position as chief of the tribe, and then Ecatzin and all those who had died at Texan hands would be properly avenged.

The cave was lit with torches and a large fire in front of the altar stone. Beneath, in a natural bowl, the Yaqui gathered in silence; the Old Man stood between the fire and the altar, swaying, his eyes rolled back in his head, feathers and beads dangling from his jet-black hair. He had a sense of the dramatic, did the Old Man. He liked to play to the crowd. He muttered in Nahuatl, splaying his bony fingers and extending his hands over the crowd. He played them like that music box with ivory keys the traveling carny man had once shown Chantico when the carnival had passed close to the Yaqui camp.

Chantico stood to one side of the front row. He had been with the secret group since the Old Man had started it up, since he had first brought them to this spirit-haunted place of power. Chantico liked to think of himself as part of the inner circle. Had not the Old Man immediately called this meeting after he'd imparted his news? With consummate showmanship, the Old Man cast a handful of dust and seeds into the fire, making it leap and sparkle and eliciting gasps from the gathering in the cavern. His eyes snapped open.

“You know him, eh, the Lord of the Star of the Dawn?” said the Old Man, his voice strong, his eyes black and twinkling in a face as brown and ridged as the canyon-scored landscape. “The one who draws the line between the world and the sky, the plumed serpent, eh?”

The crowd nodded and murmured. The Old Man said, “Quetzalcoatl, that's who I'm talking about, eh? You seen him, Chaske, am I not right, eh? You watched him swooping out of the sun, as bold as you like. And you, Chetan, with your eyes of a hawk, you watched him looping over the desert. We all saw him, eh? We all knew him. I heard him called by a hundred different names in my time, heard him called Kukulcan and Gukumatz, Ce Acatl and Naxcitl, Topiltzin, too. But we all know him as Quetzalcoatl, eh?”

“What does it mean?” called a voice from the crowd. Someone else shouted, “And where has Quetzalcoatl been since then? It's been weeks!”

The Old Man beckoned for Chantico to join him at the altar. Burning with pride, Chantico stepped to his side. The Old Man said, “The boy here, he's heard something about Quetzalcoatl.”

Someone laughed. “Chantico? What can he have heard?”

Chantico's face burned. The Old Man said, “Tell them who you heard it off, boy, eh?”

“Chichijal,” said Chantico quietly, then again, more loudly. “Chichijal. The one they call the Nameless. He told me himself.”

There was more than one gasp from the assembly. The Old Man said, “Tell them what he told you, eh?”

Chantico nodded. “The Nameless, he spoke of a dragon. He said it had crashed in the desert. He said the dragon was made of
brass
.”

Someone shouted, “Brass? So it could just be one of the machines they put in the sky, not Quetzalcoatl at all?”