Extras…

AUTHOR’S NOTES

As I mention in the afterword to Servant of the Underworld, writing a book set in Aztec times carries with it a number of challenges, not the least of which is reconstituting a history we know little about. As usual, any egregious mistakes are my own, and not those of the sources I consulted.

The other challenge is how to make the civilisation intelligible for modern readers. Most Aztec names are long; for the longer the name was, the most prestigious it was. They are also replete with a number of phonemes barbarous to English ears such as “tz” or “tl”. Accordingly, I took the decision to simplify matters somewhat. The inhabitants of the city of Texcoco are in fact the Acolhuas (much as those of the city of Tenochtitlan are the Mexica-Tenochca); but given how little they were referred to, I used the word “Texcocan”, which has the merit of having a clear common root with “Texcoco”.

Similarly a number of names were simplified. I chose to refer to the She-Snake by his title rather than by his name, the rather long and unwieldy “Tlilpopoca-tzin”; and Nezahualtzin’s full name is in fact “Nezahualpilli-tzin”, quite a mouthful. Most other names chosen were deliberately short, useful for us but something that would have been highly disrespectful in Aztec times.

I twisted history in several respects, perhaps the most notable being the addition of the High Priest for the Dead to the highest level of religious hierarchy. The histories only mention the High Priest of Tlaloc and the High Priest of Huitzilpochtli as supreme religious authorities, but I needed a triumvirate in order to justify Acatl’s presence at Court.

And, while it is true that the Great Temple, the centre of religious life in Tenochtitlan, was rebuilt and enlarged multiple times (one of the most notable expansions being the one started by Tizoc and continued by his successor Teomitl), the huge disk I describe underneath the temple was not, in fact, in this location. The disk, which showed the dismembered body of Coyolxauhqui, She of the Silver Bells, was in fact set at the bottom of the Great Temple steps. The bodies of the sacrifices would tumble down the steps, and fall onto the disk, re-enacting the primal sacrifice of She of the Silver Bells, and ensuring Huitzilpochtli remained dominant.

Harbinger of the Storm is set a year and a half after its predecessor, Servant of the Underworld. It concerns itself with the matter of the imperial succession, a thorny problem in a society which had no formal system of inheritance and relied instead on a group of elders and important noblemen (the council) to designate the man they thought fit to rule the Mexica Empire.

We have little record of what actually happened around Axayacatl-tzin’s death, save that the year of his death coincided with a total eclipse of the sun. I chose to situate the eclipse in the days following his death, which puts his death in the winter season, towards the end of the Aztec year. Obviously, given the symbolism of the Revered Speaker as representative of the Southern Hummingbird Huitzilpochtli, and the latter’s ties with the Fifth Sun, the proximity of an eclipse to his death would have seemed deeply ominous to the Aztecs.

The She-Snake is worth a brief mention here; he was part of the duality which underpinned most Nahuatl thought. Just as most gods had a female counterpart, the Revered Speaker, the representative of Huitzilpochtli, had his counterpart in the Cihuacoatl, the She-Snake. The former was in charge of what we would call external policy, such as making war; the latter handled internal matters like order in the city, the Sacred Precinct and the palace. This is the same duality we find at the lowest level between husband and wife, the husband taking care of external affairs like going to war and taking care of the fields, while the woman was the one responsible for running the household. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the She-Snake had his own palace, I chose to have Axayacatl’s She-Snake take his quarters in the Imperial Palace in order to keep him closer to the plot.

The very first She-Snake was Moctezuma I’s brother Tlacaelel, the man who is credited with rewriting the history of the Mexica Empire to give them their divine destiny to conquer the world, as well as restructure the religion around the mass sacrifices to their tribal god Huitzilpochtli. Many sources have him live well into the reign of Teomitl, but I have taken the more likely explanation offered notably by Nigel Davies, that he died in Axayacatl’s reign, leaving his son Tlilpopoca to ascend to the position in his place.

The ritual to access the Mexica heartland was inspired from the one described in Fray Diego Durán’s account (in The History of the Indies of New Spain, as collected in The Flayed God), in which the wise men of Moctezuma’s reign go to beseech Huitzilpochtli’s guidance, and are berated by the god’s mother for having forgotten their humble origins. Part of the mother’s speech I used as an inspiration for Huitzilpochtli’s angry questions in the heartland.

Another character is worth a mention, Nezahual is perhaps most known as the wise old man who announced the arrival of the Spanish to the then-Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II. Revered as a sorcerer, Nezahual is also known for being a great lover: he had 2,000 concubines (though only 40 bore him sons). His reign was the golden age of Texcoco. I therefore chose to give him as a patron god Quetzalcoatl, who was most often associated with knowledge and benevolent progress.

Finally a brief note on geography. This volume sees Acatl and Teomitl stay mostly with the Imperial Palace, with two notable exceptions. The pleasure gardens they visit in chapters 17-18 are those of Texcotzingo, built by Nezahual’s father. Their ruins are still extant in Mexico. The other place, Teotihuacan, is much more famous. The ruined pyramids bear witness to a civilisation that flourished around 150 BC-700 AD, dominating the Basin of Mexico. By the time the Aztecs came, only the ruins of the temple complex remained, which the Aztecs believed to have been built by gods. The Aztecs believed Teotihuacan to be the place where the sun had risen into the sky, hence its name, which roughly translates as “The Place Where the Gods Emerged”. The ruins themselves were walled off and became a place of pilgrimage. In the shadow of the wall a busy city-state flourished. It is in this newer city that Nezahual, Acatl and Teomitl find sleeping quarters.