The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (30 page)

The walls of the temple groaned, and I felt a presence there, something thick and oppressive, observe us. I never thought it would be possible to fear flowers, but these were more ancient things than Earth’s flowers.
 

The Xolotl dripped thick pus from his gums, and he licked it with his rope-like tongue.

“You see,” José María said, turning to me, “the little particles—the souls, they can see glimpses of Mictlán as they travel. They can see the temples of the creatures of the canyon. They can even probably see us as they travel inside that water.”

“Is this true?” I said to the Xolotl. He sat on his haunches, and now that he was closer to my height, I didn’t think he was so menacing.
 

“Your sibling is right,” the Xolotl said. “This is how your ancestors discovered our faces and heard faint traces of our songs. That’s how they learned about the Lords. And the other family members who left this canyon long ago.”

“And tell her, Scooby, tell her,” José María said.

The Xolotl growled at José María, but he continued: “That is also how those of us in the Coil—the citizens of cities like Mictlán—can see out into your world, Clara. We see and learn much when you travel through the nine rivers. We see you.”

A chill raced down my back, and the walls groaned again.

“And so each of those bits of glitter is a human—”

“Wrong, Wanderer,” the Xolotl said. “It’s every being from your world. The frogs, the trees, the jungle animals and the sea beings. Each becomes a particle in the river.”

“I could stare at these waters forever,” I said. The liquid looked cool and refreshing, and I marveled at the fact that a tree might have a soul. In what color did it shine inside that stream?

“Your brother Quetzalcóatl left you here, didn’t he?” José María said.
 

The Xolotl groaned, and smoke escaped the slits in his chest.

“My brother has abandoned many,” the Xolotl said. “I was not surprised that he would neglect me. It’s in his nature.”

“So it’s true,” I said as I elbowed José María.
 

“You saw Scooby’s brother in the snake’s eyes memory, Clara,” José María said. “He’s the Feathered Snake. Quetzalcóatl, who fought the Ocullín.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “There’s four Tezcatlipocas. The feathered snake is the white one, Huitzilopochtli the god of war is the blue one, the Flayed One is the red—”

“And yes, the Smoking Mirror is the Black Tezcatlipoca,” José María said. “But that doesn’t explain
you
, Scooby.”

The Xolotl drew his sharp claws along his left arm, and he drew blood. Now that we had a glimmer of light from the waterfall, I could see that it sparkled in hundreds of shades of red. In his bare chest, the thin slits that took in air swelled, then closed shut. Their narrow passageways made smaller music, the kind that creeps in your ear and never lets go.

The Xolotl dug his claws into his chest cavity, and he split the flesh apart. It was a simple gesture, and one without violence. He simply reached in as a mother would pull two halves of a papaya apart so she could scoop out the seeds with her fingers.

We saw the Xolotl’s breast. It was made of a thick heart, arteries and bits of his bones. Blood pumped, and the flesh pulsed with life. He kept on pulling until his chest split in two, and the seam undid itself, traveling up toward his neck and down toward his groin.

“Every living thing has a duality, Wanderer. You and your sibling, what shall we call him?”

“You can call me Bangin’ Master of the Universe,” José María said.

“Yes, Bangin’ Master of the Universe, then. Understand that my brother Quetzalcóatl and I are dual expressions of each other, even if we are both a single White Tezcatlipoca. In a way, we are just like you and the Bangin’ Master of the Universe.”

Inside his knotted flesh, wrapped around his beating heart, a snake with colorful feathers and white scales encircled the creature’s heart.

The Xolotl stopped pulling his flesh, and the wound knitted itself until his skin was smooth and all that was left were the slits on his pecs.

“So you can now see that my brother and I are separate but often the same,” the Xolotl said.
 

“That I can understand,” José María said. “Clara understands that, too. Two in one, one in two. We’re Catholic, after all.”

“What is
Catholic
?” the Xolotl said.

“Our religion,” I said.

“You must explain religion, Wanderer. We have no such word here.”

“You know—what you believe made the universe—who made the universe. What makes things right or wrong.”

“You need a
Catholic
for this knowledge?” Xolotl said.

“Well, no, but the priests, they’re the ones that teach us,” José María said.

“Ah yes, your priests,” the Xolotl said. “Odd things, those priests. Even the men who glimpsed us through the waters made up priests to ask me for favors. We have seen the priests, as well as the wicked wizards, many times, floating inside the waterfall. Begging, full of greed. I despise them.”

“Who makes it through to tell the tale, then?” José María said.

“Some of the clever priests glimpse us from the waters, that’s true. But the children—they flow down the nine rivers, and they return several times to your world in their lifetime. These are their journeys to find and commune with their tonal.”

“That’s a trip I should have made,” I said. I bit my lip. “At thirteen.”

“But things went wrong, as you know, Scooby,” José María said.

“But my brother has a point—we did learn about duality, or something like it, from the Catholics.”

“I see, Wanderer. Your
Catholics
, do they ask for knowledge, then?”

“No, no, no,” José María said. “What Clara means is that the Catholics taught us about God, and the son of God, and how the Holy Spirit—all three of them—are expressions of a single God.”

“This feels relevant, then,” the Xolotl said. “And true. Tell me more. I have never seen this God that you say travels in the waters of the nine rivers. What makes this human named ‘God’ so special?”

“No, he’s not human; he’s a god.” I said.

“I don’t understand. God is not a human?” the Xolotl said.

He doesn’t know the word ‘god,’
I thought.
 

Suddenly, a bitter smell, like burning wood and acrid oil, made the walls around us quiver. The flowers of the temple spoke.

“You must leave now,” the flowers said. They shared a single voice made up of billions of individuals. The sound was terrifying.

“The flowers do not like our exchange of words and ideas,” Xolotl said. “We must depart. We can continue elsewhere.”
 

We mounted the hummingbird, and I took one last glimpse at the crimson-blue waterfall. It warmed my heart, but it also filled me with sadness. Its specks made me smile, and I didn’t want to leave them behind. Then I remembered the eerie pressure exerted by the flowers of the temple, and I was glad we were leaving.

We rose as the hummingbird beat its wings millions of times, and we approached the top of the temple.

“Xolotl, I said. “In Chicago—on Earth, in our world—they have taught us that you and Quetzalcóatl are gods.”

“Did the flowers teach you this in your world?”

José María laughed. “Hell, no! It’s other humans that teach that to each other.”

“Then your human teachers are wrong. We do not have
gods
here, and we do not have any
Catholics
. Things inside the Coil simply
are
.”

“In our world, we use flowers for ornamentation or to show love,” I said.

“Or to mourn the dead,” José María said.

“But we don’t talk to the flowers,” I said.

“You don’t talk to the flowers,” the Xolotl said.

“No,” we replied in unison.

“And you don’t consult the plants,” the Xolotl growled.

“Maybe some people do; don’t know,” I said.

“You are imbeciles in your world, then,” roared the Xolotl.

The Xolotl’s inner sound changed from a baritone melody into a melancholy but frightening song. He extended both his arms, and he let the hummingbird’s wings brush the claws at their tips. More frightening sounds erupted from their contact.
 

“I cannot fathom a world where you do not consult with the flowers and the moss,” Xolotl said. “Down here in the Coil, plants move history through the wheels, and flowers are the keepers of all knowledge.”

It began to occur to me that the lowest levels of Mictlán belonged to the flowers. All of them eyeless, trillions of them.

“But the flowers don’t like to share knowledge, do they?” I said.

“That is correct. They believe the rift that is opening the gates between worlds is caused by knowledge coming through.”

We flew out of the temple and into darkness, and we dove toward the lake and the city on top of its surface. I didn’t have to turn my head around to feel the temple of flowers behind me, but I turned my head anyway, out of sheer habit. The structure was immense. Now that we had emerged from the shrine’s opening, my cones were working again. It felt good to breathe in air that was no longer flooded with the strong smells of the temple.

As we sped away, I recalled how my father had taken José María and me to the Templo Mayor archeological site in Mexico City when I was twelve. There we walked through the ruins of the center of the Aztec empire. I had spent an hour sketching the maquette inside the museum’s center. On this maquette, one could see the city of Tenochtitlán, its wide plazas, its cylindrical buildings, the bright reds and blues the Aztecs had used to paint their walls. At the very center of this maquette, I had learned about Templo Mayor, the most important religious and war temple of the Aztecs. One tower was red, the other blue, and each one was dedicated to a different god.
 

This memory rolled over in my head until I understood why I was recalling it. I let out a scream of joy and partial terror.

I leaned in close to my brother, hovering over his neck.

“If souls traveled through these rivers, and for some reason they were able to travel
back
to our world—like wizards might— that means they would have been able to imitate the architecture they saw,” I said. “That means Templo Mayor would have been modeled after the temple of flowers.”

“Holy crap,” José María said.

José María gave out a hoarse shout, and then another. He was doing so to get better information about the temple of flowers behind us.

“Clara, it looks just like Templo Mayor. Only twenty times as tall. And if that’s what they modeled it after—”

We approached the spinning disc set on top of the still lake.

“That means Mexico City was modeled after the city of Mictlán.”

“And inside the city we will find the Palace of the Skulls,” I said. “Right in there.”

The disc rotated as the thorns and plants that gave it structure pulsed with the sound of fireworks, oboes and insect wings.

We landed on a soft patch of grass at the very shore of the lake. Before us, one of the roads that led to its center went off into the distance. The hummingbird flew off, and we walked behind the Xolotl, whose claws made hollow scraping sounds on the road as he scrambled to a standing position. The water on each of the sides of the roads was still, unmoving. The sonar-like ability I had in Mictlán told me that not even one single ripple blemished the lake’s surface.
 

“Do you get lonely down here?” I asked the Xolotl. I couldn’t believe I was talking to him this way, but he seemed so different from the first time I ever heard and felt him, in the mountain above the canyon.

“I only feel loneliness when people ask me how lonely I’ve been.” He said. He had cried the first time I had asked his name. His human eyes blinked in the dark, and no tears rolled off his face this time.

“But you’re not alone here,” José María said. “There’s the flowers, the smoke owls, and surely the snake—”

“Blue Hummingbird asks me often if I am lonely. That is when I take leave and fly off to get away from her. She likes to wallow in self-pity. She is haunted by the events from the past.”

My father is, too,
I thought.

And so is my mother.

And me.

“Wanderer and Bangin’ Master of the Universe,” the Xolotl said, “listen carefully. You will travel through the Palace of the Skulls alone. I cannot complete that journey for you. At its end, you will exit onto the northern road of Mictlán. You will follow this road until you encounter the Snow Fields of the Lords. The journey through the snow may kill you, in which case you will be forever lost in the spaces between the wheels.”

I felt sick at hearing this possibility.

“Will there be other beings like you?” I said. I wanted to say “gods,” but I decided against it.

“You mean brothers and sisters?” The Xolotl said. “You will see none. The last of my kin to visit Mictlán was the Black Tezcatlipoca, and he’s long since gone. The only thing he left behind is his Ocullín.”

“The Black Tezcatlipoca owns that thing?” José María said. “Now that is some bullshit right there.”