Free Age of Aztec by James Lovegrove

impositions he spurned. He was starting to feel himself again.
    “Why, do you have somewhere you’d rather be?” replied Chel amiably. “A holding cell at Scotland Yard, perhaps?”
    “Is that a threat?”
    “Merely a joke. Perhaps not a funny one.”
    “As it happens, I have a business meeting at nine o’clock sharp.”
    “Ah yes, your other life. The man you are when you’re not in your Conquistador costume.”
    “It’s not a costume,” Stuart said. “It’s a pretence, a necessary disguise. I wouldn’t have been getting away with doing what I’ve been doing for half as long as I have, if I did it as plain old me. Plus, it gives me protection.”
    “The image the armour projects, though, that’s important.”
    “I don’t deny there’s some theatrics involved. I want the Conquistador’s deeds to stick in people’s minds. I want to be memorable – unignorable. I want TV coverage and newspaper headlines. I’d get none of that if I was just some bloke running about in street clothes and a balaclava.” Stuart pointed an accusing finger at Chel. “All this is pretty rich coming from you. You and your friends with the death’s head faces, the ethnic weaponry. And that jewellery you were wearing. The jade frogs and carved circle pendants. Mayan, right?”
    Chel nodded.
    “Which explains why you speak Nahuatl without an accent, and you look Anahuac. So why are you over here?”
    “To meet you, of course.”
    “No, really.”
    “Really. Well, it is a little more complicated than that. Have you got time?”
    Stuart glanced at his wristwatch. “The meeting’s in half an hour, and it’s twenty minutes from here to Reston Rhyolitic if the traffic’s good.”
    “Then we should perhaps do this on some other occasion, when you’re not so busy.” Chel stood up as if to leave. “Mustn’t interfere with the wheels of industry, must we?”
    “Or,” said Stuart, “I could phone my PA and have her postpone the meeting. It’s not urgent urgent. Just going over the half-yearly figures with the accounts team.”
    “That would be your decision. If you’re interested in listening to what I have to say...”
    “I don’t know.” Stuart genuinely didn’t know. He was intrigued by Chel, that was for sure, and there was no getting around the fact that this man and his band of bolas-wielding paramilitaries had pulled the Conquistador’s fat out of the fire last night. Stuart owed him for his continued liberty – his life, indeed. Hearing him out seemed the least he could do.
    “It shouldn’t take too long,” Chel said.
    “I’ll make the call.”
     
     
    “T HERE IS, OF course, no such thing as the Mayan nation,” Ah Balam Chel said. “Everyone knows that. The Maya are no more. We were the last of the Aztecs’ conquests in Anahuac, before the Empire’s expansion out into the rest of the world began. The Olmec, the Zapotec, the Inca and the Mixtec had been enslaved and become tributary states. The Aztecs then swarmed across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and up into the Yucatan Peninsula. Urged on by the Great Speaker, they slaughtered and pillaged, committing atrocities on a scale you wouldn’t believe. Mayan men were killed in their thousands, children too, and women raped in their tens of thousands. That, the mass rape, was a vital plank in the Aztecs’ plan. Their footsoldiers took a particular, vindictive pleasure in carrying out that particular duty. Within months, countless mixed-race infants were born. The bloodline of the Maya was thinned and sullied and would never be pure again.”
    “Yes, yes, a history lesson,” said Stuart. “I already know all this. Everybody does.”
    “You should not be so dismissive. It may have happened a long time ago, but it is as fresh in my people’s memory as if it were last week. We make sure to keep it that way. It is our duty as Mayans never to forget how we were treated. Other early Aztec conquests were mild by comparison. For us, they reserved a