Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [133]
Zaltec sensed the nearness of the childbirth, and this tiny spark of life, insignificant in scope when viewed by one who had overlooked armies, gleamed like a tempting morsel be-fore the blood-hungry god.
And so Zaltec stood silently, watching and waiting. Soon the moment would come, and he would gain his greatest victory.
»
Colon raised his hand from Halloran’s forehead as the swordsman sat up with a groan. The cleric immediately went back to Erixitl, who gasped for breath in the throes of another volley of pain. Hal climbed to his feet, his head throbbing, and quickly went to kneel beside his wife. He noticed, with vague detachment, that the driders and Lotil were gone.
The woman moaned again and threw back her head. Her legs spread limply on the ground, and she clenched her teeth, striving to push her baby into the world.
The priest held a hand before her and gently shook his head. Grimly, as the pain slowly lessened, she nodded in understanding.
“1 know,” she whispered. “Up there.”
Painfully, awkwardly, she rose to her feet. Halloran supported her, while Coton went to pick up the blanket of pluma that Lotil had dropped over Jhatli. The youth lay still and cold below it, and his blood had soaked into a portion of the feathered surface.
Slowly and agonizingly they made their way up the steps of the pyramid, stopping each time Erixitl was seized by another pain. It took them countless minutes of ever-increasing daylight to reach the top, and by the time they did, the sky was light blue and the moments between Erix’s contractions had shortened dramatically.
Coton spread the cloak on the platform on top of the pyramid some distance away from the grim altar. Immediately Halloran lowered Erixitl, and once again she gasped.
Then she screamed and wept. She threw back her head and cried out loud. She hissed through her teeth and pushed with all of her strength. Again and again she strained.
Pain became her constant emotion, a way of life that seemed as if it could bring only death. But she fought against that pain with all of her strength, striving and pushing to overwhelm and defeat it. With a groaning curse, at last she felt herself collapse. The pain was still there, but now it was a fading sensation, unimportant any longer.
Halloran, in one stunning second, found himself looking
at, and then gathering up, his son. The baby squirmed; kicked on the blanket of pluma, wrinkling his face and then uttering a sharp, demanding cry.
“A boy,” he said reverently. He handed the child to his wife and she clutched it to herself.
Colon surprised them by tugging insistently at the blanket of pluma. He pulled it free and Erix gasped in surprise. “The Cloak-of-One-Plume!”
Indeed, the cloak woven from countless tiny feathers by her father Lotil now looked exactly like the one she had worn, the one that had marked her as the chosen daughter of Qotal.
Slowly, devoutly, Coton rose to his feet in the pale blue of the dawn. He carried the billowing cloak in his arms, and then he gently spread it across the altar.
At that moment, the sun crested the eastern horizon, and the first rays of the day fell upon the altar. The cloak fleeted these, sending up a dazzling rainbow of light.
The twisted violently, plummeting into a steep dive. For the first time, Poshtli felt the tug of gravity below him, and then he saw the ocean, pale blue in the dawn and spreading to the far limits of his vision to each side.
But not before him. There, a thin green line of land emerged from the distance, quickly growing into the bluff at Twin Visages. Now he saw the two faces he had seen before, still staring out to sea, waiting… waiting for him!
Or more precisely, for Qotal.
“She has given a life that I may return!” the exulted aloud.
“A sacrifice?” Poshtli demanded.
“No-not yet,” replied the god ominously. But now the Plumed Serpent had no time for mortals.
The great dragon soared toward the small pyramid, settling slowly to earth. He landed, bracing one massive foot on each of the four corners of the pyramid