During victory marches, captured enemy warriors walked along as proudly as they could – death by sacrifice guaranteed prosperity in the afterlife – but with their hearts in their throats: dying on the sacrifice stone was no picnic, and before getting there they sometimes had to spend months in a cage in the yard of the warrior who had captured them. With white-lipped stares, their eyes darting reflexively here and there, they would watch the crowd waving their little flags and tossing flowers, imagining that eventually one of these bastards would buy a strip of warrior arm or loin in the marketplace to eat in magic tomato salsa on a tostada.
Hernan Cortes and his ragged little conquistadore army shamble into Tenoxtitlan in the year 1519, to discover an alien world ruled over by Moctezuma, a tired and hallucinogen-addled king of a culture run on blood and drugs.
…the reason his office had invested so much in these rituals was that the Tenochca believed in them – or pretended to believe because they brought wealth to Tenoxtitlan, gave the world solidity, and permitted the flow of magic mushrooms and vision-inducing cacti that made life tolerable in a city where everyone worked without cease.
Sometime a little too meta for its own good – the foreword seems to go on forever and it’s too gleeful in pulling its own ending apart – but when it’s focused, which is much of the book, it’s great. These last days of the Aztec Empire are imagined in dirty detail, an experimental meta-historical fiction that roams across many different aspects of the culture and the players, giving a good deal of depth and grain to its lessons.
The priests did as they liked – Moctezuma had given them too much power – and now they could scarcely put two and two together, afflicted with the shakes from excess consumption of leg of sacrificial victim, and high as kites from stuffing themselves with mushrooms, cacti and magic tomatoes.
It does frequently go nuts, by the way. This is one of the moments where the metaness works:
I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can’t imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year’s festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognised it. It was T. Rex’s ‘Monolith’.
Don’t think you know how it ends – it wanders a little into alternate history possibilities at a couple of points, but the author sets things up so his story-within-the-story both lands, and lands feasibly enough to be pleasing.
By turns deeply interesting, really funny and absolutely fucking chilling, this is a real ride of a book. Don’t worry too much about the fake foreword thing – the book is careful enough in its writing that you won’t miss much by just skimming it and getting on to the human meat of the book.
YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES, Álvaro Enrigue (UK) (US+)