Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [23]
The book, full of starkly coloured figures, unfolded like a screen. ‘They were on their way to an alphabet – phonograms mixed with ideograms. Here, you see, a Spanish cleric has kindly interpreted.’ He ran his thumb down a wide column of handwritten blue text on one side of the page. ‘And there’s an English translation running in a narrow band across the bottom. So there’s your primary source material.’
Bernice nodded, more impressed with twentieth‐century archaeology than she had expected. ‘How many of these books survived?’
‘Not many. The conquistadors burned a lot of them – especially those to do with religion. They had special orders to destroy anything heathen. The Spanish translations always have a strongly Christian flavour – all the Aztec gods are lumped together as “the Devil”, and so forth.’
‘Right. I’m especially interested in the Great Temple – ancient as well as modern records.’
Fitzgerald moved along the wall until he came to a bulky filing cabinet. ‘Here we go. The ’78 people weren’t the first to find the temple, you know. There was Gamio in 1913, and Cuevas found a bit of the stairs in 1933.’ He slid open a drawer and pulled out a fat file. ‘But the proper excavations didn’t begin until they found Coyolxauhqui.’
Fitzgerald snapped on a desk lamp and spread out the photos on the wooden surface. ‘Charming little lady, isn’t she?’ Coyolxauhqui lay in a circle of stone, a demon‐faced woman, her head and limbs disconnected from her distorted body. ‘After their hearts were removed, the victims were sent tumbling down the stairs into her hard embrace. As soon as the archaeologists got a look at this, they knew they’d found part of the temple of Huitzilopochtli.’
‘Weet‐Zeelo‐Potch‐Tlee,’ said Bernice, trying to get her mouth around the word. ‘The sun god?’
‘Well, yes. Though the Aztecs’ gods are far more complicated than the Egyptian ones – they had a hideously complex religion. Huitzilopochtli was the Aztecs’ personal deity. Their mascot, if you like. He killed his sister Coyolxauhqui when she plotted against him. She was a night deity, and he represented the sun – so it was an allegory for the perpetual return of the dawn, the triumph of light over darkness.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Bernice. ‘What I ideally need to know is whether anything unusual happened when the relief was found. Any peculiar events, any strange objects… anything at all out of the ordinary.’
‘Curse of the mummy’s tomb, you mean?’
‘The Aztecs didn’t make mummies,’ said Bernice.
‘I know, I know,’ laughed Fitzgerald. ‘But after Egypt… I just wondered if you were after some more of the Doctor’s von Daniken stuff. Little green men.’
Bernice shrugged. ‘Any planet in a well‐populated galaxy will have traces of extraterrestrial contact. That’s a given of archaeology.’
Professor Fitzgerald shrugged with his face. ‘The Egyptian government won’t let me back in to take a look at the Sheta‐Khu’u site, you know. Apparently there’s a military blockade around it.’ He went back to the filing cabinet. ‘Look, you can have a rummage through all these records – it’s a complete inventory of the items removed from the temple.’
Bernice gave the man her best smile as he departed, wearing the quizzical expression she had seen on the faces of many people who’d encountered the Doctor.
Right. The temple. What was so important about it?
* * *
Ace yelled and brought the sword around. Iccauhtli caught it with his shield, the obsidian blades sticking in the wood, and twisted his club between her ankles. Back‐pedalling, she tripped, laughing. ‘Good!’ she shouted. ‘Let’s start again.’
The Doctor stood with Ce Xochitl, watching the mock battle. The judge was in full regalia – a patterned cloak, golden plugs inserted into his nose and lower lip.
The Time Lord reached up and extracted his jacket from the flowering tree where Ace had hung it. ‘Would it be possible for us