Necahual | Page 3

thing: seeing that we been making do for a few hundred years already you might wonder what we know that you ain't figure out yet. Second thing: you here to tell us what to do, right? Because you assume we don't know what we doing. You want tell us what to do, how to think. That mental conquest friend. Mental."
A boom shakes the air. Paige looks up at the sky. None of us can see anything, but I shiver.
"Any of you able to contact anyone?" Paige asks.
We all try. Shake our heads. We're cut off.
"Come inside with me now," our new host says. "Drop you weapon to the ground. You don't need them."
For some reason, without the tais, the three soldiers are looking at me. Command structure has returned to our small unit. Ironic how we fall into the old patterns. This is what it would have been like in The League before the Xenowars. Only then it wasn't The League, just spacefaring humans associated with their old national origins on the mother planet.
I have a decision to make.
"Do you have any way that we can communicate to our superiors?" I ask.
Jami nods.
"That we do," he says.
Into the rabbit hole I decide, and nod. We drop our tangle guns and the blade near my ribs disappears just as abruptly as it had appeared. I still want to know how it got under my armor.
"The name Jami," the man in the cream suit says, shaking my hand. "Jami 'Manicou' Derrick."
Jami turns around, and we follow the barefoot, dapper man into the concrete-block house. We troop past the cat, which is now working on cleaning an extended furry back leg.
#
Jami asks us if we read much. He wants to know about 'War of the Worlds,' an ancient text, he tells us, but with an interesting moral to it.
None of us have read it.
He laughs gently, takes off his tie and suit jacket and hangs them off the back of a canvas chair. "You'll wish," he laughs at us. "You should have wait and talk with everyone longer. So now, it a mess. The League trying to come in and reshape everything to be just like it wants it, and it ain't that easy."
The door creaks open and we look straight into the face of the enemy.
#
The Azteca reclines in a leather chair while an elderly black lady in a bright red and yellow patterned shawl carefully snips at his flat hair. A red cape drapes around his knees where his hands rest, gently crossed over each other. The gold plug in his nose glints in the light streaming through a large opened window, and his jade earrings dangle as he slightly turns his head to regard us.
Blue eye shadow swirls around the crow's feet that crinkle the edges of his eyes. His black smeared lips twitch.
"The League has arrived," he pronounces, looking at our uniforms. "What do you think of our conquerors, Jami?" Jami is leaning against the concrete wall, arms folded, looking at the small ensemble in the room.
"The first conqueror of Tenochtitlan arrive in small numbers," Jami said. "They had armor and superior technology. The League only got the large number and the armor."
Jami smiles sadly at us.
"But this is not a group of Spaniards with gold lust and domination in their hearts," The Azteca says. "The League is here to save us. Is it not?"
His eyes are piercing. Something has wounded him. He hates us.
"The first conquistadors thought they were saving the savages back then too," he adds.
I have nothing to say, but stand straight and return his restrained fury with a calm gaze of my own. I am a professional.
"You done, then, Frederick?"
"I miss my true name."
Jami sighs.
"I guess it don't make no difference what you call yourself now."
Acolmiztli stands up and gathers up the cherry bowl with his hair clippings in it.
"I'm not much of a believer," he says, "but the old ways are specific. You must have your hair cut in a way that does not lose tonalli. Or you risk losing the strength of your spirit." He takes a deep breath. "In times like these, I need all the strength I can get."
The door slams behind him.
"He's bitter," Paige notes. They've been taking my lead, remaining quiet. I'm in charge. I'm their tai.
"The League should look very very carefully into assuming," Jami says, looking at the door with us, "that all Azteca same."
There are, he tells us, Tolteca. Reformed Azteca who have spurned human sacrifice and made great changes to Azteca society in the last hundred years.
My stomach flip flops.
"Human sacrifice?"
Jami unfolds his arms.
"Acolmiztli tells me he only sacrificed snake, bird, and butterfly. He say," and Jami imitates Acolmiztli's voice perfectly… "Because he so loved man Quetzalcoatl allowed only the sacrifice of snakes, birds, and