Feathered Serpent 2012 - Softcover

JUNIUS PODRUG is an accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction. He lives on Cape Cod.

1
Teotihuacán Archaeological Site, Mexico, Today
“We’ll drive you from our land, we’ll drink your blood.”
Caden Montez watched men performing as werejaguars, legendary man-beasts of ancient Mexico, strike at each other with wooden swords, drawing blood to satisfy the covenant with the gods—blood for rain. With snarling jaguar headpieces, claws on their hands and feet, bare chests, and legs covered with gray ash and black spots, they were in the chilling guise of the infamous night creatures of the jungle. But the blood is real, she thought.
Watching the performance from the steps of the ruins of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, Caden found the brutality ugly. And the taunts bothered her. The show was for tourists at the ancient ru­ins of Teotihuacán, Mexico’s largest tourist attraction, and the crowd that had gathered to watch the performance had no idea that the words sung in the old Nahuatl tongue, the language of the Aztecs, were threats.
An expert in both astrobiology, the scienti.c search for extraterres­trial life, and archaeology, the study of antiquity, her specialty was ancient Mexico. She spoke Nahuatl, and she didn’t .nd it amusing that the men were using the ancient tongue to shout murder threats at unsuspecting tourists.
The shouted threats had increased the sense of unease she’d felt all morning after a strange phone call from her assistant, Julio. Wrapped up in research for her into a dark legend of the ancient city, he appeared to have enmeshed himself in the project in unhealthy ways. That the re­search had been related to the ancient tales of Nawals, the  blood- drinking werejaguars the dancers  were mimicking, intensi.ed her concern for Julio.
“We’ll drink your blood,” they sang to a norteamericano with a cam­corder who stepped in for a  close- up.
“What exactly do the performers represent?” Laura Gillock asked.
Gillock had come to the site to do a National Geographic piece on Caden’s work at Teotihuacán. This was Caden’s .rst meeting with the magazine writer, and she wanted to make a good impression.
“They’re performing a blood covenant dance. The small cuts are sacri.ces of blood so the gods give rain for the maize crop. The men snapping whips make sounds that mimic the thunder god.”
“Why do the gods want blood?”
“The gods of ancient Mexico  were nourished with human blood. It gave the sun god the strength to rise each day, the rain god the strength to water the earth, the war god the strength to win battles. So the gods made a covenant with mankind: Feed us blood and we will give you rain and sunshine for a good harvest, and strength and courage for victory in war.”
“Those black spots and ash make the players look like leopards.”
“Jaguars, they’re dressed as werejaguars.”
“Werejaguars? You mean like werewolves?”
“Exactly, with vampires thrown in because werejaguars also drank their victims’ blood. Legends of  shape- changing beasts exist all over the world— European werewolves, African  leopard- men,  tiger- men in India. Here, it’s jaguars because the beasts have a special place in the lore of Latin America. They’re the only great roaring cats in the Americas, creatures of dangerous grace and savage power, but at three or four hundred pounds, not something you’d want to pet. The indigenous people have always feared and revered them. The word jaguar comes from their word yaguar— he who kills with one leap.”
“Wasn’t there a murder cult like the Thugs of India  here in Mexico?”
“Cult of the Jaguar, a secret society that arose to drive out the invaders after the Spanish conquest. Members dressed as jaguars prowled the night, stalking and murdering Spaniards. A legend arose that they  were  shape­changers who could transform into werejaguars, hideous creatures called Nawals. The king’s men .nally put an end to the cult with the hangman’s noose, but the legend of Nawals didn’t die in the jungles of Mexico where modern culture is still barely felt even today.”
Caden knew millions of people still lived in jungle areas and had never assimilated into the general population, even though it had been nearly .ve centuries since the conquest. Periodically, these people whose culture lagged behind modern Mexico  were in open warfare with the government. She hoped that shouting threats to tourists was just a private joke among them.
At the time of Christ, Teotihuacán was the largest city in the western hemi sphere, the center of a powerful empire and a metropolis that rivaled ancient Rome in size. Now it was Mexico’s biggest tourist attraction. Thirty miles northeast of Mexico City, the ruins of the ancient city had two mag­ni.cent pyramids: Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon. The pyra­mid dedicated to the sun god was only a hair smaller than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
“How do you pronounce the name of the city?” Gillock asked.
“Tay- oh- tee- wah- kahn. Most people just call it Tay- o or Tee- o. Teotihuacán meant ‘city of the gods’ in the Aztec language. No one knows the real name of the city or the culture that built it. Or even why the largest city ever built on the American continent before Columbus was abandoned.
“All of the civilizations that  rose afterwards in  Mesoamerica— the Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, and  others— mimicked the structures they found here in building their own temples and pyramids, but never created ones this large. And none of them tried to populate the deserted city.”
“Why?”
“They  were afraid. Even the Aztecs, the storm troopers of ancient Mex­ico, feared the ghost city. They sensed dark magic at the huge pyramids and temples along the broad boulevard called the Avenue of the Dead. I suppose they sensed something we moderns  can’t relate to. All the cultures that came afterwards adopted the infamous blood covenant and sacri.ced humans to the gods. And Teo was where the covenant began. The main god and leg­endary builder of the city was said to be particularly bloodthirsty.”
“Sounds creepy. But great stuff for my article. Is the dark mystery of the city part of your research project?”
o Caden knew there was a possible connection, but the theory that the magazine writer had come to interview her about was controversial enough without adding an  ancient- murder- cult angle. Besides, it wasn’t a pleasant subject with her. Research into the dark legend was the assignment she’d given to Julio.
“Not directly, though I’m back in Teo because of the legendary .gure that began the blood covenant. Are you familiar with the .eld of astrobi­ology?”
“I looked it up before I came. Search for life on other planets. NASA has you astrobiologists looking for life on Mars. SETI people with those enormous satellite dishes are waiting for ET to call. Jodie Foster had that job in the movie Contact, didn’t she?”
Caden laughed. “Well, I suppose that’s the public’s conception. Astrobi­ology is usually thought of as the search for life outside of Earth, but it’s re­ally the study of life in the universe, Earth included. We begin by studying life on Earth and extend the investigation into the far reaches of space.”
“I read that you search for water on other planets.”
“That’s one focus. Water is the universal elixir, the magic potion that is necessary for life as we know it. Science believes life began in the ocean. When our primeval ancestors crawled onto land, they carried water with them inside their skin. I’m sure you know, humans are about two- thirds water, which is about the same percentage of water on the surface of the planet.
“So if we’re going to look for life as we know it in other parts of the cosmos, we look for water. So far, the prime candidates for having water are comets, a couple moons of Saturn, and maybe beneath the surface of Mars.”
“Water’s the blood of Mother Earth.” Gillock grinned. “Something I read when I was doing a piece on a Gaia group, people who view the planet as a living organism. Speaking of water, have you heard about the incident in the Gulf of Mexico?”
“The dead .sh? I know a few weeks ago dead .sh suddenly started sur­facing, but I’ve been so wrapped up  here, I  haven’t followed the story.”
“It’s getting worse. My editor wants me to check it out on the way home. The government says there’s a leak of methane. I understand that’s essentially natural gas, the stuff we use in our stoves. Apparently the bot­tom of the Gulf is full of the stuff.”
“There are enormous methane deposits in many places under the seas. Some scientists believe that methane eruptions on the ocean .oor are what’s behind the mysterious disappearances of ships in the Bermuda Triangle. Methane is also called swamp gas because it kills life in water, creating dead ponds.”
“So if it’s a search for water, why Teo? Not much around  here.”
“My search is for life on Earth that originated elsewhere. It’s a theory scientists call panspermia. The concept is that the seeds of life are scattered and carried throughout the universe, with planets like Earth having a friendly environment for life to evolve into higher states.”
“How would life get  here . . . from there?”
“A comet carrying microbes is the best candidate. There’s even evi­dence that an impact with a big comet billions of years ago left t...