Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [4]
The whole situation was intriguing. These little temporal paradoxes were simple enough to create, especially when your path through space and time was so tangled. But they could be very complex to handle. Causality operated backwards, the future affected the past, affected people’s actions. His actions.
What was it Cristián didn’t want to tell him about the Happening?
For that matter, could he be sure the Mexican’s story was genuine? Cristián struck him as truthful, but he had the advantage of them, in more ways than one. There was the photograph, of course, but there was no way to know the circumstances under which it had been taken. No way to know if they had left him as friends or enemies.
The Doctor opened his eyes. Nothing. He couldn’t sense anything.
He had the knack of sensing spirit of place, but he couldn’t feel anything unusual here. As far as he could tell, the Hallowe’en Man had been acting with the true spontaneity of the random mass murderer.
Whatever the Happening had been, it had badly damaged Cristián Alvarez. And, whatever had happened, it was the result of the Doctor’s actions. Normally he was in and out of people’s lives so quickly that he didn’t get to see the long‐term effects of his handiwork. Life was a series of hellos and goodbyes.
Ah well, he had all that to look forward to.
He stood back to admire the ruins.
The Aztecs’ greatest temple had been at the centre of their magnificent city: Tenochtitlan, mighty Tenochtitlan, whose armies and glory swelled to fill all of Mexico.
Of course, when the Spanish had arrived, they had levelled the place. The Great Temple had been burned to the ground. Tradition had it that the rubble was used to build the first Christian church in Mexico.
But tradition was often wrong. They had found the remains of the Great Temple under the streets of Mexico City, purely by chance. The link with the past was unbroken – one city built on another, intertwined with the ancient stones.
He looked down into the pit of excavations. The stones loomed out of the night, dimly lit by the street‐lights, angular, meaningless shapes. The odour of wet earth mixed with the smell of petrol fumes and garbage. Like all of Mexico City, the Great Temple was sinking into the swamp. This unexpected reminder of the past would eventually be swallowed.
He sighed, remembering the temple in its full glory, remembering Barbara’s futile attempt to change the Mexica. They were a proud people, ferocious, their entire way of life based on war and sacrifice. It had been their constant quest for sacrificial victims that had driven them from one shore of the land to the other. His companion had not known what she was up against when she tried to convert them, tried to do away with the killing. And that had been in their early period, before thousands upon thousands had died under the stone knives. He had tried to explain to her that you don’t just get up in the morning, eat your cornflakes, and go out and change history – change an entire way of life.
But it had hardly mattered. The Aztecs had had only a few more decades of glory left. It had not helped that Cortés and his conquistadors had shown up in the year One Reed, when the Mexica expected their white‐skinned god Quetzalcoatl to return. Barbara’s English complexion was part of the reason they had mistaken her for a goddess.
The Doctor shrugged, shaking himself loose of his memories. There was more to do tonight. Human beings spent half their lives asleep – rather more than half, in most cases. But it was all office hours to the Doctor.
From his hotel room, Huitzilin watched the Time Lord leave. He grinned, an invisible slash of white in the darkness. ‘Otiquihiyohuih,’ he said, and his voice rang in the air like a bell.
* * *
Ace had heard about Mexican water. She found a six‐pack of agua mineral in the fridge, cracked one open, sat on Cristián’s faded sofa and