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“Had a bit of a language barrier?”
“Deep and wide.” He used his hands to illustrate again, and Gina was momentarily distracted by the contrast of his white nails against smooth dusky skin beneath a dusting of curly black hair. Those hands might look like the hands of a scholar, clean and slim, but they’d felt like the hands of a laborer—strong and capable, the palms calloused just enough to entice.
“They bridged the gap with hieroglyphics,” he continued, and she yanked her gaze, and her thoughts, from his hands. “Pacifying the masses by allowing them to re-create the codices. Under strict supervision of course.”
“Of course,” Gina murmured. “But re-creations aren’t originals.”
“So every codex has to be taken for what it is—someone’s retelling of what they, or maybe someone they knew, heard, or saw, or read. Not to mention that many of the priests decided to Christianize the Aztec tales, either by forcing the scribes to do so or by writing their own versions in Spanish.”
“All in all, not the best source of info.”
“But the only ones we’ve got left.”
“And the writings your mom found?”
“Tell the tale of a superwarrior, birthed by the moon, to protect the People of the Sun.”
“Pretty.”
He smiled. “That’s what you get when you turn pictures into words. As the story begins, the Aztecs marched north and engaged the enemy.”
“What enemy?”
“To the Aztecs, anyone not them was just asking for it. According to the codex, these natives fought back hard and they began to win. But the Aztecs never lost, and now we know why.”
“Why?”
“This superwarrior was also a sorcerer.”
Gina started to get uneasy. Teo wanted to dig where her parents had died. In a place the Ute believed was cursed. Where she had heard strange whispers and felt … something.
An Aztec sorcerer perhaps?
But that was crazy. Wasn’t it? There was no such thing as a sorcerer. Not then and definitely not now.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked.
“Yes.” He smiled at her confusion. “I don’t believe the warrior was a sorcerer, but the Aztecs did.” He spread his hands. “Hey, back then the sun was a god. Sorcerers and magic would have fit right in.”
“Maybe some guy figured out how to throw his voice, use herbs to make people froth at the mouth, then he ‘cured’ them.” She made quotes around cured with her fingers.
“I’m inclined to agree. But as my mother always insisted, the legend came from somewhere. Something out of the ordinary had to have happened for the story to be repeated and passed down and eventually written down. Take out the sorcerer and you’ve still got superwarrior.”
“A soldier who was bigger, stronger, or super in some other way,” Gina reasoned. “He went north, kicked some native ass; then the rest of them snatched a few hundred captives and everyone hightailed it south of the Rio Grande.”
“Except that’s not what happened. According to my mother’s translations the Indians had a sorcerer of their own and he confined the superwarrior to a cavern beneath the earth.”
Gina’s neck prickled as the bad feeling she already had deepened. “One sorcerer is far-fetched enough,” she managed, “but two? Really?”
“Hieroglyphics are hard to interpret. For instance, are the colors used just for decoration or do they add meaning to what they symbolize? Does a different color indicate a different direction? Day? Night? Male? Female? A certain connection to the glyph on the right or the left?”
Gina shrugged.
“Exactly,” Teo agreed. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe yes on this page but no on that one. It can be maddening. In the end, my mother interpreted the location of the superwarrior’s tomb in six different ways. We dug at five of the sites. We didn’t find anything.” He glanced at her. “The sixth translation is: ‘Where the tree of life springs from a land awash with the blood of the sun.’”
Gina closed her eyes.
“I don’t know if I would ever have found it if it weren’t for—”
